HR: 1615h
AN: A54D-02 INVITED    [Abstracts]
TI: The role of climate benchmark records in climate-change attribution and projection
AU: * Collins, W
EM: WDCollins@lbl.gov
AF: Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, 1 Cyclotron Road MS 90R1116, Berkeley, CA 94720- 8126, United States
AB: The detection, attribution, and projection of climate change present significant challenges to the climate sciences community. This presentation explores the potential utility of SI-traceable climate measurements from space in these three critical areas of research. The discussion is framed in terms of the current assessment reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Highly accurate decadal-length climate records of temperature, humidity, and the spatial gradients in these fields would represent a significant advance in detection and attribution activities. It is also increasingly urgent to quantify feedbacks from reductions in sea ice and snow and to detect feedbacks in the climate system from changes in cloud properties. Observations regarding the sign and magnitude of cloud feedbacks would help determine which climate models could produce the most realistic projections of future climate change. Finally, climate benchmark records would be particularly useful for detecting abrupt shifts in the climate regime despite inevitable discontinuities in satellite observing systems.
DE: 0321 Cloud/radiation interaction
DE: 0360 Radiation: transmission and scattering
DE: 1622 Earth system modeling (1225)
DE: 1626 Global climate models (3337, 4928)
DE: 1640 Remote sensing (1855)
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting