Thomas R. Knutson is a climate modeller at the US Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). [1] His research covers hurricane activity, the link between climate change and hurricane incidence and intensity, and climate change detection and attribution.
He served as a contributing author on working group 1 of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. He is an Associate Editor of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate. He has published in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Geophysical Research, Journal of Climate, Tropical Cyclone Research and Review, Tellus A and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
In 2004, Knutson published a paper suggesting that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide would lead to more intense hurricanes. This finding was subsequently supported by independent research. Knutson was invited to discuss his thesis on Ron Reagan's MSNBC talk show, but the invitation was withdrawn after the White House intervened. [2]
Numerical climate models use quantitative methods to simulate the interactions of the important drivers of climate, including atmosphere, oceans, land surface and ice. They are used for a variety of purposes from study of the dynamics of the climate system to projections of future climate. Climate models may also be qualitative models and also narratives, largely descriptive, of possible futures.
The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) is a laboratory in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR). The current director is Venkatachalam Ramaswamy. It is one of seven Research Laboratories within NOAA's OAR.
The Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) is a robust, recurring pattern of ocean-atmosphere climate variability centered over the mid-latitude Pacific basin. The PDO is detected as warm or cool surface waters in the Pacific Ocean, north of 20°N. Over the past century, the amplitude of this climate pattern has varied irregularly at interannual-to-interdecadal time scales. There is evidence of reversals in the prevailing polarity of the oscillation occurring around 1925, 1947, and 1977; the last two reversals corresponded with dramatic shifts in salmon production regimes in the North Pacific Ocean. This climate pattern also affects coastal sea and continental surface air temperatures from Alaska to California.
Numerical weather prediction (NWP) uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. Though first attempted in the 1920s, it was not until the advent of computer simulation in the 1950s that numerical weather predictions produced realistic results. A number of global and regional forecast models are run in different countries worldwide, using current weather observations relayed from radiosondes, weather satellites and other observing systems as inputs.
In hydrology, moisture recycling or precipitation recycling refer to the process by which a portion of the precipitated water that evapotranspired from a given area contributes to the precipitation over the same area. Moisture recycling is thus a component of the hydrologic cycle. The ratio of the locally derived precipitation to total precipitation is known as the recycling ratio, ρ:
A tropical cyclone forecast model is a computer program that uses meteorological data to forecast aspects of the future state of tropical cyclones. There are three types of models: statistical, dynamical, or combined statistical-dynamic. Dynamical models utilize powerful supercomputers with sophisticated mathematical modeling software and meteorological data to calculate future weather conditions. Statistical models forecast the evolution of a tropical cyclone in a simpler manner, by extrapolating from historical datasets, and thus can be run quickly on platforms such as personal computers. Statistical-dynamical models use aspects of both types of forecasting. Four primary types of forecasts exist for tropical cyclones: track, intensity, storm surge, and rainfall. Dynamical models were not developed until the 1970s and the 1980s, with earlier efforts focused on the storm surge problem.
Jerry Mahlman was an American meteorologist and climatologist.
Syukuro "Suki" Manabe is a Japanese–American meteorologist and climatologist who pioneered the use of computers to simulate global climate change and natural climate variations. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi, for his contributions to the physical modeling of earth's climate, quantifying its variability, and predictions of climate change.
A tropical cyclone is a rapidly rotating storm system characterized by a low-pressure center, a closed low-level atmospheric circulation, strong winds, and a spiral arrangement of thunderstorms that produce heavy rain and squalls. Depending on its location and strength, a tropical cyclone is referred to by different names, including hurricane, typhoon, tropical storm, cyclonic storm, tropical depression, or simply cyclone. A hurricane is a strong tropical cyclone that occurs in the Atlantic Ocean or northeastern Pacific Ocean, and a typhoon occurs in the northwestern Pacific Ocean. In the Indian Ocean and South Pacific, comparable storms are referred to as "tropical cyclones", and such storms in the Indian Ocean can also be called "severe cyclonic storms".
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Coupled Model is a coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model (AOGCM) developed at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in the United States. It is one of the leading climate models used in the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, along with models developed at the Max Planck Institute for Climate Research, the Hadley Centre and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
The maximum potential intensity of a tropical cyclone is the theoretical limit of the strength of a tropical cyclone.
The history of numerical weather prediction considers how current weather conditions as input into mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather and future sea state has changed over the years. Though first attempted manually in the 1920s, it was not until the advent of the computer and computer simulation that computation time was reduced to less than the forecast period itself. ENIAC was used to create the first forecasts via computer in 1950, and over the years more powerful computers have been used to increase the size of initial datasets and use more complicated versions of the equations of motion. The development of global forecasting models led to the first climate models. The development of limited area (regional) models facilitated advances in forecasting the tracks of tropical cyclone as well as air quality in the 1970s and 1980s.
Venkatachalam Ramaswamy is the Director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), studying climate modeling and climate change. "A leading climate scientist", his work is cited as supporting evidence for significant stratospheric climate change. He focuses in particular on radiative transfer models and the hydrologic cycle in the atmosphere. He has actively supported the development of supercomputing approaches that enable researchers to achieve higher resolution and greater complexity in climate models. As a lead author involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ramaswamy's contributions was recognised by the joint award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to the IPCC.
Cecilia M. Bitz is an American climatologist known for her research on sea ice and high-latitude climate change. She is a professor and chair in the Atmospheric Sciences Department, as well as the director of the Program on Climate Change at the University of Washington. She was featured on NPR's All Things Considered segment to speak about factors that lead to sea ice loss in 2007, and testified before the United States Senate committee of Energy and Natural Resources on arctic opportunities in 2015.
Shian-Jiann Lin is a Taiwanese-American atmospheric scientist. He is currently the head of the Weather and Climate Dynamics Division at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the lead developer of the GFDL Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere Dynamical Core (FV3). and a lead developer or key contributor to several weather and climate models developed using FV3.
Jenni L. Evans is a Professor of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at Pennsylvania State University, Director of the Institute for CyberScience and President of the American Meteorological Society. She was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 2010 and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019.
Kerry Harrison Cook is an American climate scientist who is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the analysis of climate variability and change in the tropics using observational analysis and high-resolution numerical modeling. Specialties include the climate of Africa and the dynamics of intense tropical rainfall. She was elected Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 2009 and was awarded the Joanne Simpson Tropical Meteorology Research Award in 2021. She is the Chair of the American Meteorological Society's Climate Variability and Change Committee.
Rong Zhang is a Chinese-American physicist and climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Her research considers the impact of Atlantic meridional overturning circulation on climate phenomena. She was elected Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 2018 and appointed their Bernhard Haurwitz Memorial Lecturer in 2020.
Thomas L. Delworth is an atmospheric and oceanic climate scientist and Senior Scientist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), part of NOAA. He also serves on the faculty of Oceanic Science at Princeton University.
Ronald J. Stouffer is a meteorologist and adjunct professor at the University of Arizona, formerly Senior Research Climatologist and head of the Climate and Ecosystems Group at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), part of NOAA. He has also served on the faculty of Princeton University.
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