Related papers: Nitrous Oxide and Climate
The increasing frequency of global climate extremes has significantly impacted the terrestrial carbon cycle. Extreme weather events such as heatwaves, droughts, and extreme precipitation pose serious threats to ecosystem carbon…
In this work, we propose an approach to teaching global warming adapted to the new high school curricula. The aim is to build a link between CO$_2$ emissions and the rise in the Earth's average temperature, based as far as possible on…
Understanding the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere is critical for predictions regarding future climate changes. A simple mass conservation analysis presented here generates tight estimations for the atmosphere's retention time constant.…
Explaining the evidence for surface liquid water on early Mars has been a challenge for climate modelers, as the sun was ~30% less luminous during the late-Noachian. We propose that the additional greenhouse forcing of CO2-H2…
Approximately 1.4 Ga after life first appeared, atmospheric oxygen suddenly jumped by more than an order of magnitude over a 20-50 Ma period. The contrast between these two timescales does not seem to be due to any sudden, large amplitude…
In recent years, several potentially habitable, probably terrestrial exoplanets and exoplanet candidates have been discovered. The amount of CO2 in their atmosphere is of great importance for surface conditions and habitability. In the…
The South and East Asian summer monsoons are globally significant meteorological features, creating a strongly seasonal pattern of precipitation. The stability of the monsoon is of extreme importance for a vast range of ecosystems and for…
A survey of the data on measured particle fluxes and the rate of ionization in the atmosphere is presented. Measurements as a function of altitude, time and cut-off rigidity are compared with simulations of particle production from cosmic…
Atmospheres play a crucial role in planetary habitability. Around M dwarfs and young Sun-like stars, planets receiving the same insolation as the present-day Earth are exposed to intense stellar X-rays and extreme-ultraviolet (XUV)…
It is known that a gamma ray burst (GRB) originating near the Earth could be devastating to life. The mechanism of ozone depletion and subsequent increased UVB exposure is the primary risk, but models also show increased nitrification…
We have developed a characterization of the geological evolution of the Earths atmosphere and surface in order to model the observable spectra of an Earth-like planet through its geological history. These calculations are designed to guide…
The history of molecular oxygen (O$_2$) in Earth's atmosphere is still debated; however, geological evidence supports at least two major episodes where O$_2$ increased by an order of magnitude or more: the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) and…
The evidence for abundant liquid water on early Mars despite the faint young Sun is a long-standing problem in planetary research. Here we present new ab initio spectroscopic and line-by-line climate calculations of the warming potential of…
The presence of valleys on ancient terrains of Mars suggest that liquid water flowed on the martian surface 3.8 billion years ago or before. The above-freezing temperatures required to explain valley formation could have been transient, in…
Electron cooling, in which free electrons lose energy to vibrational excitation of gases, has been identified as a significant process in the atmospheres of Mars and Venus for electron impact on CO2. This process does not appear to have…
The possibility of low but nontrivial atmospheric oxygen (O2) levels during the mid-Proterozoic (between 1.8 and 0.8 billion years ago, Ga) has important ramifications for understanding Earth's O2 cycle, the evolution of complex life and…
In this paper, we compare the chemistry and the emission spectra of nitrogen-dominated cool, warm, and hot ultra-short-period (USP) super-Earth atmospheres in and out of chemical equilibrium at various surface pressure scenarios ranging…
We determine the volcano climate sensitivity and response time for the Mount Pinatubo eruption. This is achieved using observational measurements of the temperature anomalies of the lower troposphere and the aerosol optical density (AOD) in…
Thermochemical models have been used in the past to constrain the deep oxygen abundance in the gas and ice giant planets from tropospheric CO spectroscopic measurements. Knowing the oxygen abundance of these planets is a key to better…
A recent study by Ramirez et al. (2014) demonstrated that an atmosphere with 1.3-4 bar of CO2 and H2O, in addition to 5-20% H2, could have raised the mean annual and global surface temperature of early Mars above the freezing point of…