The United Kingdom Chemistry and Aerosols (UKCA) is a community Chemistry-Aerosol-Climate model which are research runs of the Met Office's operational Unified Model. It runs within the Hadley Centre example with multiple flavours of varying horizontal resolutions and vertical layers.
It is a collaboration of the Met Office with the University of Cambridge, University of Leeds, University of Oxford, University of Reading, University of East Anglia, and Lancaster University in the UK and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research of New Zealand. [1]
A general circulation model (GCM) is a type of climate model. It employs a mathematical model of the general circulation of a planetary atmosphere or ocean. It uses the Navier–Stokes equations on a rotating sphere with thermodynamic terms for various energy sources. These equations are the basis for computer programs used to simulate the Earth's atmosphere or oceans. Atmospheric and oceanic GCMs are key components along with sea ice and land-surface components.
The Meteorological Office, abbreviated as the Met Office is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy led by CEO Penelope Endersby, who took on the role as Chief Executive in December 2018, is the first woman to do so. The Met Office makes meteorological predictions across all timescales from weather forecasts to climate change.
The Met Office Hadley Centre — named in honour of George Hadley — is one of the United Kingdom's leading centres for the study of scientific issues associated with climate change. It is part of, and based at the headquarters of the Met Office in Exeter.
Atmospheric chemistry is a branch of atmospheric science in which the chemistry of the Earth's atmosphere and that of other planets is studied. It is a multidisciplinary approach of research and draws on environmental chemistry, physics, meteorology, computer modeling, oceanography, geology and volcanology and other disciplines. Research is increasingly connected with other areas of study such as climatology.
The Max Planck Institute for Chemistry is a non-university research institute under the auspices of the Max Planck Society in Mainz. It was created as a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in 1911.
Earth's climate arises from the interaction of five major climate system components: the atmosphere (air), the hydrosphere (water), the cryosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere. Climate is the average weather, typically over a period of 30 years, and is determined by a combination of processes in the climate system, such as ocean currents and wind patterns. Circulation in the atmosphere and oceans is primarily driven by solar radiation and transports heat from the tropical regions to regions that receive less energy from the Sun. The water cycle also moves energy throughout the climate system. In addition, different chemical elements, necessary for life, are constantly recycled between the different components.
David J. Lary is a British-American atmospheric scientist interested in applying computational and information systems to facilitate discovery and decision support in Earth system science. His main contributions have been to highlight the role of carbonaceous aerosols in atmospheric chemistry, heterogeneous bromine reactions, and to employ chemical data assimilation for satellite validation, and the use of machine learning for remote sensing applications. He is author of AutoChem, NASA release software that constitutes an automatic computer code generator and documentor for chemically reactive systems. It was designed primarily for modeling atmospheric chemistry, and in particular, for chemical data assimilation. He is author of more than 150 publications receiving more than 3,850 citations.
Over the last two centuries many environmental chemical observations have been made from a variety of ground-based, airborne, and orbital platforms and deposited in databases. Many of these databases are publicly available. All of the instruments mentioned in this article give online public access to their data. These observations are critical in developing our understanding of the Earth's atmosphere and issues such as climate change, ozone depletion and air quality. Some of the external links provide repositories of many of these datasets in one place. For example, the Cambridge Atmospheric Chemical Database, is a large database in a uniform ASCII format. Each observation is augmented with the meteorological conditions such as the temperature, potential temperature, geopotential height, and equivalent PV latitude.
Stephen E. Schwartz is an atmospheric scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He served from 2004 to 2009 as the Chief Scientist of the Atmospheric Science Program of the United States Department of Energy. He is author of over 100 scientific publications dealing mainly with cloud chemistry and forcing of climate change by atmospheric aerosols.
The Unified Model is a Numerical Weather Prediction and climate modeling software suite originally developed by the United Kingdom Met Office, and now both used and further developed by many weather-forecasting agencies around the world. The Unified Model gets its name because a single model is used across a range of both timescales and spatial scales. The models are grid-point based, rather than wave based, and are run on a variety of supercomputers around the world. The Unified Model atmosphere can be coupled to a number of ocean models. At the Met Office it is used for the main suite of Global Model, North Atlantic and Europe model (NAE) and a high-resolution UK model (UKV), in addition to a variety of Crisis Area Models and other models that can be run on demand. Similar Unified Model suites with global and regional domains are used by many other national or military weather agencies around the world for operational forecasting.
Stratospheric sulfur aerosols are sulfur-rich particles which exist in the stratosphere region of the Earth's atmosphere. The layer of the atmosphere in which they exist is known as the Junge layer, or simply the stratospheric aerosol layer. These particles consist of a mixture of sulfuric acid and water. They are created naturally, such as by photochemical decomposition of sulfur-containing gases, e.g. carbonyl sulfide. When present in high levels, e.g. after a strong volcanic eruption such as Mount Pinatubo, they produce a cooling effect, by reflecting sunlight, and by modifying clouds as they fall out of the stratosphere. This cooling may persist for a few years before the particles fall out.
TOMCAT/SLIMCAT is an off-line chemical transport model (CTM), which models the time-dependent distribution of chemical species in the troposphere and stratosphere. It can be used to study topics such as ozone depletion and tropospheric pollution, and was one of the models used the IPCC report on Aviation and the Global Atmosphere. It incorporates a choice of detailed chemistry schemes for the troposphere or stratosphere, and an optional chemical data assimilation scheme.
Robert Jay Charlson is an American atmospheric scientist, climate scientist, pioneer in the fields of climate forcing and climate change, and coauthor of the CLAW hypothesis.Charlson is known for his research in atmospheric chemistry, aerosol physics, aerosol/cloud/climate interaction, aerosol and cloud instrumentation.
Kimberly A. Prather is an American scientist who is an Atmospheric Chemist, Distinguished Chair in Atmospheric Chemistry, and a Distinguished Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC San Diego. Her work focuses on how humans are influencing the atmosphere and climate. In 2019, she was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for technologies that transformed understanding of aerosols and their impacts on air quality, climate, and human health. In 2020, she was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She is also an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Mace Head Atmospheric Research Station is located on the West Coast of Ireland in Carna, and is one of the longest running mercury recording stations in the world. The stations location is highly important as it is far away from neighbouring cities to ensure no pollutants interfere with recordings, and its location is also highly important as it is ideal for studying the atmosphere under Northern Hemispheric and European conditions. The station has the dual status of being a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Global Atmosphere Watch (GMO) station and a European Monitoring and Evaluation Program (EMEP) supersite. Mace Head research and monitor the climate and atmospheric composition, focusing on aerosol-cloud interactions and mercury readings.
Mian Chin is a Chinese atmospheric chemist. She is a physical scientist in the atmospheric chemistry and dynamics laboratory in the earth science division at Goddard Space Flight Center. Her research includes aerosol-cloud-chemistry-climate interactions. She received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal in 2005.
Nadine Unger is a Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry at the University of Exeter. She has studied the role of human activities and forests on the Earth's climate.
Joyce Penner is an atmospheric scientist known for her research on climate change, especially on the impact of aerosols and clouds.
Ulrike Lohmann is a climate researcher and professor for atmospheric physics at the ETH Zurich. She is known for her research on aerosol particles in clouds.