Related papers: Using the Climate App to learn about Planetary Hab…
Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on…
Understanding the causes and consequences of, and devising countermeasures to, global warming is a profoundly complex problem. Network representations are sometimes the only way forward, and sometimes able to reduce the complexity of the…
Understanding when global glaciations occur on Earth-like planets is a major challenge in climate evolution research. Most models of how greenhouse gases like CO2 evolve with time on terrestrial planets are deterministic, but the complex,…
The ability of a planet to maintain surface water, key to life as we know it, depends on solar and planetary energy. As a star ages, it delivers more energy to a planet. As a planet ages it produces less internal heat, which leads to…
In order to understand the climate on terrestrial planets orbiting nearby Sun-like stars, one would like to know their thermal inertia. We use a global climate model to simulate the thermal phase variations of Earth-analogs and test whether…
The search for biosignatures necessitates developing our understanding of life under different conditions. If life can influence the climate evolution of its planet then understanding the behaviour of life-climate feedbacks under extreme…
While many accept climate change and its growing impacts, few converse about it well, limiting the adoption speed of societal changes necessary to address it. In order to make effective climate communication easier, we aim to build a system…
A qualitative understanding of the greenhouse effect has long been available through models based on globally- and time-averaged quantities. We examine here a simple 864-cell climatological model that emphasizes vertical radiative energy…
Modern weather and climate models share a common heritage, and often even components, however they are used in different ways to answer fundamentally different questions. As such, attempts to emulate them using machine learning should…
Our present-day atmosphere is often used as an analog for potentially habitable exoplanets, but Earth's atmosphere has changed dramatically throughout its 4.5 billion year history. For example, molecular oxygen is abundant in the atmosphere…
We discuss how greenhouse gases affect radiation transfer in Earth's atmosphere. We explain how greenhouse gases like water vapor or carbon dioxide, differ from non-greenhouse gases like nitrogen or oxygen. Using simple thermodynamics and…
The habitable zone (HZ) describes the range of orbital distances around a star where the existence of liquid water on the surface of an Earth-like planet is in principle possible. While 3D climate studies can calculate the water vapor, ice…
Determining changes in global temperature and precipitation that may indicate climate change is complicated by annual variations. One approach for finding potential climate change indicators is to train a model that predicts the year from…
The Sun becomes brighter with time, but Earth's climate is roughly temperate for life during its long-term history; for early Earth, this is known as the Faint Young Sun Problem (FYSP). Besides the carbonate-silicate feedback, recent…
We make a case for "planetary computing" -- infrastructure to handle the ingestion, transformation, analysis and publication of global data products for furthering environmental science and enabling better informed policy-making. We draw on…
Remote sensing of the atmospheres of distant worlds motivates a firm understanding of radiative transfer. In this review, we provide a pedagogical cookbook that describes the principal ingredients needed to perform a radiative transfer…
The mean surface temperature on Earth and other planets with atmospheres is determined by the radiative balance between the non-reflected incoming solar radiation and the outgoing long-wave black-body radiation from the atmosphere. The…
The diversity of planetary systems that have been discovered are revealing the plethora of possible architectures, providing insights into planet formation and evolution. They also increase our understanding of system parameters that may…
Can information theory provide insights into whether exoplanets are habitable? Here we apply information theory to a range of simulated exoplanet transmission spectra as a diagnostic tool to search for potential signatures of life on…
Climate science has become more ambitious in recent years as global awareness about the environment has grown. To better understand climate, historical climate (e.g. archived meteorological variables such as temperature, wind, water, etc.)…