Climate change: atmospheric

Cao MK, Gregson K, Marshall S. 1998. Global methane emission from wetlands and its sensitivity to climate change. Atmospheric Environment 32 3293-3299. 

Without discussing in any detail the biological and physical processes within the climate system in this book, the chemical composition of the atmosphere and its variation in time and space, as well as its trends, is essential for an understanding of climate change. Atmospheric substances with their physical and chemical properties will have many effects in the climate system we list the most important among them here together with impacts (there are many more impacts, parallel and synergistic effects) ... 

Burning fossil fuel releases carbon into the atmosphere—more than 6.3 billion tons in 1998 alone. Significant amounts of carbon also come from burning of live wood and deadwood. Such fires are often deliberately set to clear land for crops and pastures. In 1988 the smoke from fires set in the Amazon Basin covered 1,044,000 square miles. By far the most serious implication of this is the significant threat to Earth s ecosystems by global climate change. 

Anthropogenic Emissions and Climate Variability. Journal of Geophysical Research 103(DI 3) 15979-15993. Fkickinger, J., ct al. (1999). Variations in Atmospheric NjO Concentration During Abrupt Climate Changes. Science 285 227-230. 

The Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) is the division of NOAA that conducts and directs oceanic and atmospheric research. Since carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and fossil fuels are the leading generator of carbon dioxide, the work of the twelve Environmental Research Laboratories and eleven Joint Institutes of OAR to describe, monitor, and assess climate trends are of great interest to all parties interested in the affect of energy use on climate change. 

The Table of Contents for this collection will facilitate this discussion. Notice that the papers are grouped into the categories of Atmospheric, Aquatic and Terrestrial Components, Global Carbon Cycle and Climate Change, and Global Environmental Science Education. The reader may want to consider the various chemical species studied in each paper. Next, the reader may wish to group the papers by whether they address the source or the receptor, the transport or transformation processes for the chemical species. Finally, the reader needs to establish the time scales and the spatial resolution used. 

How well do GCMs simulate the spatial variability of climatic change Today s GCMs utilize data grids that partition the atmosphere into cells, each covering an area about the size of Colorado. A mean state of the atmosphere (temperature, humidity, cloud cover, for example) is computed for each cell. Consequently, any ou ut statistics (the prediction) has a lower spatial resolution (more genei ized, less detailed) than the real atmosphere is likely to manifest. 

Predicting the effect of the terrestrial vegetation response to C02-induced climate change for a particular site involves explicit treatment of feedbacks. These are diagramed in Figure 3. The balance between decomposition + autotrophic respiration and gross primary production (GPP) determines the net storage and release of carbon to atmosphere. Climate meets each of these... 

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