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Along with the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the loss of primary forests and other natural ecosystems is a major disruption of the Earth system causing global concern. Quantifying planetary warming from carbon emissions,…
Afforestation greatly influences several earth system processes, making it essential to understand these effects to accurately assess its potential for climate change mitigation. Although our understanding of forest-climate system…
The boreal forest plays a crucial role as a global carbon sink. This study uses two 250-year simulations of Canada's Taiga Plains, an area targeted by the 2 Billion Trees Program to evaluate afforestation and reforestation strategies that…
Improving observations of ocean heat content show that Earth is absorbing more energy from the sun than it is radiating to space as heat, even during the recent solar minimum. The inferred planetary energy imbalance, 0.59 \pm 0.15 W/m2…
One of the most pressing questions in climate science is that of the effect of anthropogenic aerosol on the Earth's energy balance. Aerosols provide the `seeds' on which cloud droplets form, and changes in the amount of aerosol available to…
This study explores the potential to enhance the reflectance of solar insolation by the human settlement and grassland components of the Earth's terrestrial surface as a climate change mitigation measure. Preliminary estimates derived using…
Aerosol-cloud interactions (ACI) include various effects that result from aerosols entering a cloud, and affecting cloud properties. In general, an increase in aerosol concentration results in smaller droplet sizes which leads to larger,…
This paper presents a modeling and control framework for distributed systems in low Earth orbit, with the scientific objective of obtaining high accuracy estimates of the Earth's Energy Imbalance (EEI). This metric robustly quantifies the…
Canada's northern boreal forest edge offers considerable potential for climate change mitigation through large-scale tree planting. Afforestation in these sparsely forested regions could assist the natural northward migration of forests…
The state of earth's climate is constrained by well-known physical principles such as energy balance and the conservation of energy. Increased greenhouse gas concentrations affect the atmospheric optical depth, and physical consistency…
Using an idealised climate model incorporating seasonal forcing, we investigate the impact of rotation rate on the abundance of clouds on an Earth-like aquaplanet, and the resulting impacts upon albedo and seasonality. We show that the…
The terrestrial water cycle links the soil and atmosphere moisture reservoirs through four fluxes: precipitation, evaporation, runoff, and atmospheric moisture convergence (net import of water vapor to balance runoff). Each of these…
Reconciling agricultural production with climate-change mitigation is a formidable sustainability problem. Retaining trees in agricultural systems is one proposed solution, but the magnitude of the current and future-potential benefit that…
Goessling et al. (1) link the record-breaking warming anomaly of 2023 to a global albedo decline due to reduced low-level cloud cover. What caused the reduction remains unclear. Goessling et al. considered several geophysical mechanisms,…
Marine low clouds play a crucial role in Earth's radiation budget. These clouds efficiently reflect sunlight and drive the magnitude and sign of the global cloud feedback. Nevertheless, the evolution of shallow cloud decks over the last…
The terrestrial water cycle links the soil and atmosphere moisture reservoirs through four fluxes: precipitation, evaporation, runoff and atmospheric moisture convergence. Each of these fluxes is essential for human and ecosystem…
We study the influence of low-level water and high-level ice clouds on low-resolution reflection spectra and planetary albedos of Earth-like planets orbiting different types of stars in both the visible and near infrared wavelength range.…
An old conceptual physics-based back-of-the-envelope model for greenhouse effect is revisited and validated against state-of-the-art reanalyses. Untraditional diagnostics show a physically consistent picture, for which the state of earth's…
Anomaly-diffusing energy balance models (AD-EBM) are routinely employed to analyze and emulate the warming response of both observed and simulated Earth systems. We demonstrate a deficiency in common multi-layer as well as…
Destabilization of the water cycle threatens human lives and livelihoods. Meanwhile our understanding of whether and how changes in vegetation cover could trigger abrupt transitions in moisture regimes remains incomplete. This challenge…