Author: huanggroup

Congratulations to Kevin Bloxam for winning a Canada Graduate Scholarship for MSc awarded by NSERC! Kevin has worked on the radiative damping process in the atmosphere.

Gina Chou and Benjamin Vennes both won the 2017 NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA). Gina will work on Arctic radiative feedback and Benjamin will research air pollution-meteorology relation. Congratulations to both of them!

Tan et al. studied an interesting phenomenon – supersaturation, i.e., water vapor pressure exceeding saturation value – in the atmosphere by assembling data from multiple aircraft measurement campaigns. We find the climatic impact, as measured by radiative forcing, of supersaturation is significant and, interestingly, very sensitive to co-existing clouds. Particularly, we note an interesting change of the sign of the radiative effect of cirrus cloud at optical depth ~ 1.8 (see Manuscript Fig. 3j and Supplementary Information Fig. S4). Read more about it in this article “An assessment of the radiative effect of supersaturation based on in-situ observations“.

Lin et al. measured the climate forcing of air pollutants (aerosols) brought about by international trade for different regions. We showed that local and remote pollution and associated climate impacts from developing countries is very much related to the consumption in developed countries. This paper disclosed a strong, yet little-recognized link among consumption, trade and environmental consequences. Read more about it in this article “Globalized climate forcing of aerosols via international trade“.

Media coverage: McGill News, Phys.org, CTV, techno-science, Asia-today

Does a positive (warming) radiative forcing always lead to global warming? Xia et al. documented a very interesting experiment that says No. In this experiment, stratospheric ozone is increased to mimic the recovery from ozone hole. Much to our surprise, despite of a strong positive instantaneous forcing of the the ozone perturbation, a weak global cooling is observed in our simulation, which we find is largely due to an (over-)compensating high cloud adjustment. Read more about it in this article “Strong modification of stratospheric ozone forcing by cloud and sea ice adjustments“.

Our earlier work disclosed a distinctive spatial pattern of the CO2 radiative forcing, which at first look is surprising in that CO2 itself is uniformly distributed. Based on radiative transfer theory, Huang, Tan and Xia explained why the CO2 radiative forcing varies geographically and showd how it matters for climate change, especially concerning the poleward energy transport of the atmosphere and ocean. Read more about it in this article: “Inhomogeneous radiative forcing of homogeneous greenhouse gases“.