Midlatitude Cirrus Cloud Structural Properties Analyzed From The Extended Facility For Atmospheric Remote Sensing Dataset

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2004The knowledge on cirrus inhomogeneous structural properties is important not only in radiation calculations, but also in deeply understanding the dynamics mechanism including the formation, development, and dissipation of cirrus clouds. The midlatitude cirrus inhomogeneous structural properties have been evaluated by analyzing the 10-year high cloud datasets obtained at the University of Utah, Facility for Atmospheric Remote Sensing in Salt Lake City, UT. Three goals have been reached in this research. First, the means to analyze lidar data using wavelet analysis, an advanced approach to obtain information on the structure of cirrus clouds, has been successfully developed. And then, typical cirrus structures including Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities, cirrus mammata, and the uncinus cells have been analyzed by case studies and statistical survey. Their dynamical mechanisms, environmental characteristics, and vertical and horizontal length scale have been studied. Thirdly, using the method based on the wavelet transform and other methods, a climatology of midlatitude cirrus horizontal inhomogeneous properties is developed from the FARS lidar backscattered power data, the proxies of real cirrus clouds

Tropical cyclones in the South-West Indian Ocean : intensity changes, oceanic interaction and impacts

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (p. 229-253).This study investigates the climatology, intensification and ocean atmosphere interaction in relation to the passage of tropical cyclones (TCs) in the South-West Indian Ocean (SWIO). A Climatology of TCs in the SWIO including landfall in the area of Mozambique and Madagascar was developed for the 1952-2007 and 1980-2007 periods

Flood Forecasting Using Machine Learning Methods

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue Flood Forecasting Using Machine Learning Methods that was published in Wate

Atmospheric effects on land classification using satellites and their correction.

Haze occurs almost every year in Malaysia and is caused by smoke which originates from forest fire in Indonesia. It causes visibility to drop, therefore affecting the data acquired for this area using optical sensor such as that on board Landsat - the remote sensing satellite that have provided the longest continuous record of Earth's surface. The work presented in this thesis is meant to develop a better understanding of atmospheric effects on land classification using satellite data and method of removing them. To do so, the two main atmospheric effects dealt with here are cloud and haze. Detection of cloud and its shadow are carried out using MODIS algorithms due to allowing optimal use of its rich bands. The analysis is applied to Landsat data, in which shows a high agreement with other methods. The thesis then concerns on determining the most suitable classification scheme to be used. Maximum Likelihood (ML) is found to be a preferable classification scheme due to its simplicity, objectivity and ability to classify land covers with acceptable accuracy. The effects of haze are subsequently modelled and simulated as a summation of a weighted signal component and a weighted pure haze component. By doing so, the spectral and statistical properties of the land classes can be systematically investigated, in which showing that haze modifies the class spectral signatures, consequently causing the classification accuracy to decline. Based on the haze model, a method of removing haze from satellite data was developed and tested using both simulated and real datasets. The results show that the removal method is able clean up haze and improve classification accuracy, yet a highly non-uniform haze may hamper its performance

State of the climate in 2013

In 2013, the vast majority of the monitored climate variables reported here maintained trends established in recent decades. ENSO was in a neutral state during the entire year, remaining mostly on the cool side of neutral with modest impacts on regional weather patterns around the world. This follows several years dominated by the effects of either La Niña or El Niño events. According to several independent analyses, 2013 was again among the 10 warmest years on record at the global scale, both at the Earths surface and through the troposphere. Some regions in the Southern Hemisphere had record or near-record high temperatures for the year. Australia observed its hottest year on record, while Argentina and New Zealand reported their second and third hottest years, respectively. In Antarctica, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station reported its highest annual temperature since records began in 1957. At the opposite pole, the Arctic observed its seventh warmest year since records began in the early 20th century. At 20-m depth, record high temperatures were measured at some permafrost stations on the North Slope of Alaska and in the Brooks Range. In the Northern Hemisphere extratropics, anomalous meridional atmospheric circulation occurred throughout much of the year, leading to marked regional extremes of both temperature and precipitation. Cold temperature anomalies during winter across Eurasia were followed by warm spring temperature anomalies, which were linked to a new record low Eurasian snow cover extent in May. Minimum sea ice extent in the Arctic was the sixth lowest since satellite observations began in 1979. Including 2013, all seven lowest extents on record have occurred in the past seven years. Antarctica, on the other hand, had above-average sea ice extent throughout 2013, with 116 days of new daily high extent records, including a new daily maximum sea ice area of 19.57 million km2 reached on 1 October. ENSO-neutral conditions in the eastern central Pacific Ocean and a negative Pacific decadal oscillation pattern in the North Pacific had the largest impacts on the global sea surface temperature in 2013. The North Pacific reached a historic high temperature in 2013 and on balance the globally-averaged sea surface temperature was among the 10 highest on record. Overall, the salt content in nearsurface ocean waters increased while in intermediate waters it decreased. Global mean sea level continued to rise during 2013, on pace with a trend of 3.2 mm yr-1 over the past two decades. A portion of this trend (0.5 mm yr-1) has been attributed to natural variability associated with the Pacific decadal oscillation as well as to ongoing contributions from the melting of glaciers and ice sheets and ocean warming. Global tropical cyclone frequency during 2013 was slightly above average with a total of 94 storms, although the North Atlantic Basin had its quietest hurricane season since 1994. In the Western North Pacific Basin, Super Typhoon Haiyan, the deadliest tropical cyclone of 2013, had 1-minute sustained winds estimated to be 170 kt (87.5 m s-1) on 7 November, the highest wind speed ever assigned to a tropical cyclone. High storm surge was also associated with Haiyan as it made landfall over the central Philippines, an area where sea level is currently at historic highs, increasing by 200 mm since 1970. In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide all continued to increase in 2013. As in previous years, each of these major greenhouse gases once again reached historic high concentrations. In the Arctic, carbon dioxide and methane increased at the same rate as the global increase. These increases are likely due to export from lower latitudes rather than a consequence of increases in Arctic sources, such as thawing permafrost. At Mauna Loa, Hawaii, for the first time since measurements began in 1958, the daily average mixing ratio of carbon dioxide exceeded 400 ppm on 9 May. The state of these variables, along with dozens of others, and the 2013 climate conditions of regions around the world are discussed in further detail in this 24th edition of the State of the Climate series. © 2014, American Meteorological Society. All rights reserved

The Southern Ocean Observing System (SOOS)

[in “State of the Climate in 2014” : Special Supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Vol. 96, No. 7, July 2015

Using Geographic Information Systems and remote sensing to improve the management of kelp resources in South Africa

Includes bibliographical references.In 2002 the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEA&T), Marine and Coastal Management (M&CM) and the Seaweed Unit undertook a program to document the localities and quantities of the standing crop of the economically important kelps, Ecklonia maxima and Laminaria pallida, in the fourteen commercial seaweed Concession Areas that contain commercial quantities of kelps. The primary objective of this study was to establish a coastal kelp resource database for the South African coastline from Cape Agulhas to the Orange River (the international border with Namibia). The method was designed to integrate past and current analysis of multi-year kelp data from commercial harvesting, biomass and kelp bed extent while allowing for the integration of future surveys within the inventories

Simulating organization of convective cloud fields and interactions with the surface

The mesoscale organization and structure of convective clouds is thought to be rooted in the thermodynamic properties of the atmosphere and in the turbulent to mesoscale dynamics of the flow. Such structure may contribute to the transition between shallow and deep convection. The thermodynamic state of the boundary layer is forced by the amount of surface fluxes from below. Conversely, landscape patterns and land-cover heterogeneity may equally give rise to focused regions for deep convection triggering, in particular when patch sizes exceed 10 km. Since the convective boundary layer has a mediating function between the surface and deep storm clouds, the connection between surface and upper atmosphere is not straightforward. It is generally believed to involve local erosion of the capping inversion layer, the build-up of a moist energy supply, gradual humidification of the lower-free troposphere that reduces dry air entrainment into burgeoning deeper clouds, and thermal mesoscale circulations that can generate moisture convergence and locally forced ascent. To what extent microscale realistic surface heterogeneity and an interactive surface response matter to shallow and deep convection and its organization remains an open question. In this dissertation, we describe the coupling of a physiology-based vegetation model (HYBRID) and of a sea surface flux algorithm (COARE) to the cloud-resolving Active Tracer High-resolution Atmospheric Model (ATHAM). We investigate the full diurnal cycle of convection based on the example of the Hector storm over Tiwi Islands, notably the well-characterized event on 30th November 2005. The model performs well in terms of timing and cloud dynamics in comparison to a range of available observations. Also, ATHAM-HYBRID seems to do well in terms of flux partitioning. Whilst awaiting more thorough flux validation, we remain confident that the interactive surface response of both HYBRID and COARE is suited for the purpose of simulating convective-scale processes. We find the storm system evolution in 3D simulations to be robust with respect to differences in surface configuration and initialization. Within our 3D sensitivity runs, we could not identify a strong dependence on either realistic surface heterogeneity in the island landscape or on the interactive surface response. We conclude that in our case study at least, atmospheric (turbulent) dynamics likely dominate over surface heterogeneity effects, provided that the bulk magnitude of the surface energy fluxes, and their partitioning into sensible and latent heat (Bowen ratio), remain unaltered. This is consistent with 2D sensitivity studies, where we find model grid-spacing and momentum diffusion, governing the dynamics, to have an important influence on the overall evolution of deep convection. Fine grid-spacing is necessary, as the median width of updraught cores mostly does not exceed 1000 m. We associate this influence with the dry air entrainment rate in the wake of rising parcels, and with how resolution and diffusion act on coherent structures in the flow. In 2D sensitivity studies with differences in realistic heterogeneities of surface properties, we find little evidence for a clear deterministic influence of these properties on the transition between shallow and deep convection, in spite of largely different storm evolutions across the various runs. In these runs, we tentatively ascribe triggering to stochastic features in the flow, without discarding the relevance of convergence lines produced by mesoscale density currents, such as the sea breeze and cold pool storm outflows.This research has been funded through the Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR), Luxembourg, under the grant BFR07-089, and supported by the Luxembourgish Ministry for Higher Education and Research through CEDIES, by the Cambridge European Trust (CET) and the National Environment Research Council (NERC), UK, as well as by Prof. Hans-F. Graf