Publication Abstracts
Del Genio 2022
, 2022: Convection as a regulator of the Earth's climate. In Studies of Cloud, Convection and Precipitation Processes Using Satellite Observations. Z.J. Luo, G. Tselioudis, and W.B. Rossow, Eds., Lectures in Climate Change, vol. 3, World Scientific, pp. 3-19, doi:10.1142/9789811256912_0001.
Bill Rossow began his career as a planetary scientist, creating one of the first general circulation models (GCMs) to represent the strong greenhouse effect and circulation of the thick CO2 atmosphere of Venus. Bill's seminal paper on the time scales of cloud microphysical source and sink processes and how they can be used to understand clouds on a variety of Solar System planets (Rossow, 1978) introduced that community to the physics in clouds and it is still used today by scientists trying to characterize the atmospheres of planets outside our Solar System
Bill then shifted his focus to climate science, a field that was just beginning to struggle with the idea that clouds play an important role in climate change. Bill entered the field fairly early in the history of satellite remote sensing, a time when satellite data consisted almost exclusively of images or global maps. As the leader of the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP), Bill revolutionized the field of remote sensing by retrieving systematic, quantitative information about clouds from operational weather satellite datas-ets that were not designed with that purpose in mind (Rossow and Schiffer, 1991). This was the first comprehensive estimate of the fraction of the Earth covered by clouds, using differ-ent approaches that helped quantify uncertainties and gave users data options to make their own decisions on what to include or exclude. In retrospect, one of the more important contributions of ISCCP was its retrievals of cloud optical thickness and top pressure. In the ISCCP dataset, these are available in compact form in mesoscale joint-histograms of fre-quencies of occurrence of different ranges of optical thickness and top pressure. These histograms are of considerable utility in objectively identifying the cloud morphological types long used by surface weather observers (Hahn et al., 2001).
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BibTeX Citation
@inbook{de01900n,
author={Del Genio, A.},
editor={Luo, Z. J. and Tselioudis, G. and Rossow, W. B.},
title={Convection as a regulator of the Earth's climate},
booktitle={Studies of Cloud, Convection and Precipitation Processes Using Satellite Observations},
year={2022},
volume={3},
pages={3--19},
publisher={World Scientific},
series={Lectures in Climate Change},
doi={10.1142/9789811256912_0001},
}
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RIS Citation
TY - CHAP ID - de01900n AU - Del Genio, A. ED - Luo, Z. J. ED - Tselioudis, G. ED - Rossow, W. B. PY - 2022 TI - Convection as a regulator of the Earth's climate BT - Studies of Cloud, Convection and Precipitation Processes Using Satellite Observations T3 - Lectures in Climate Change VL - 3 SP - 3 EP - 19 DO - 10.1142/9789811256912_0001 PB - World Scientific ER -
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