Every year, a majority of all Atlantic hurricanes originate from African easterly waves. Yet, less than 20% of all African waves originate tropical cyclones (including hurricanes). It is of interest to investigate if African ...

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an important contributor to Earth’s inter-annual climate variability, with worldwide weather effects (Whetton and Rutherfurd, 1994; Hoerling and Zhong, 1997; Dai and Wigley, 2000). ...

Ice clouds have significant impacts on the Earth’s radiative budget. Their radiative impact highly depends on ice cloud microphysical properties. Climate and weather prediction models have to make certain assumptions about ...

We investigate the impact of tropical forcing on the predictability of the atmosphere in a two-layer spectral model. The focus is on the improvement of extended range forecasts in the extratropics from knowledge of the ...

Unforced, subcritical nonlinear simulations fail to produce meaningful variability, indicating that forcing is necessary in maintaining the low-frequency variability in the barotropic system under subcritical condition. ...

Black carbon-containing aerosol particles (called BC particles hereafter) are a major particle type in the atmosphere. Their source is the incomplete combustion of carbon containing material, which means that except for ...

The principal objective of this study is to determine whether or not the penetration of a passive tracer is analogous to the penetration of a greenhouse-gas-induced heating.

In this thesis, the sensitivity of the Earth's climate is studied by modeling past climatic variations with two-dimensional seasonal energy balance model. This thesis consists of two parts. The first part is a study of the ...

Global comparison between the MISR and MODIS cloud masks shows large discrepancies over regions dominated by small clouds. This discrepancy was further explored using an ASTER dataset at 15m resolution over the tropical ...

Since the advent of dual-polarization radar, methods of classifying hydrometeors by type from measured polarization variables have been developed. However, the deterministic approach of existing hydrometeor classification ...