Mercury (Hg) is a ubiquitous trace metal in the environment originating from both natural and anthropogenic sources. It is a pollutant of concern because of the adverse human health effects caused by the consumption of fish and seafood containing methylmercury, which is a neurotoxin. Through development of two transport and ...

This study investigates the spatial and temporal variability of surface air temperature (SAT) in the instrumental record of climate, emphasizing the detection of SAT change in the presence of natural variability as well as the attribution of SAT variability and trends to atmospheric circulation changes, as reflected in ...

Sea salt aerosols (SSA) have a critical influence on radiation, cloud formation and chemistry of the polar atmosphere. In addition to the commonly accepted open ocean source of SSA, several studies have suggested that SSA can be produced by sublimation of windblown salty snow or frost flowers over sea ice-covered regions. To ...

In this work we improve the skill of climate field reconstructions (CFRs) through the use of an online paleoclimate data assimilation (PDA) method within the Last Millennium Reanalysis framework (LMR). A computationally cheap forecast model, known as a linear inverse model (LIM), is employed here to provide 1-year forecasts ...

This work introduces a high resolution (0.1° ocean), slab ocean version of the Community Earth System Model (CESM1(CAM5)). This model is used to investigate ice/atmosphere interactions through comparison with a standard resolution (1° ocean) control run. Differences in the mean ice fields are dominated by differences in the ...

The role of tropical teleconnections on Antarctic sea ice and climate is investigated. Teleconnections are generated in a fully coupled and a slab ocean simulation. We find that both experiments are able to replicate the observed satellite-era anomalies in atmospheric circulation in west Antarctica. Perturbation heating anomaly ...

Mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) are large, long-duration complexes of clouds that are composed of a mixture of convective and stratiform components united by a mesoscale circulation. By developing an innovative spatial compositing technique that combines dual-polarimetric and Doppler radar data obtained during the Dynamics ...

A fundamental test of the representation of clouds in models is evaluating the simulation of present-day climate against available observations. Satellite retrievals of cloud properties provide an attractive baseline for this evaluation because they can provide near global coverage and long records. However, comparisons of ...

The Community Earth System Model’s Large Ensemble is used to test the hypothesis that spring melt pond area is a robust predictor of September sea ice minimum extent in the Arctic. Melt pond area is examined in the context of a number of plausible predictors, focusing on the thermodynamic mechanisms that control ice growth ...

Successfully forecasting when and where individual convective storms will form remains an elusive goal for short-term numerical weather prediction. In this dissertation, the convective initiation (CI) challenge is considered as a problem of insufficiently resolved initial conditions and dense surface weather observations are ...