SEMINAR: AOML Seminar - January 24, 2013 - 2:00 p.m. - AOML Library - Second floor - Professor Milton Halem - "Global Decadal Trends of Greenhouse Gases and Surface Temperature Linkages"

[Aoml.Receptionist <aoml.receptionist@noaa.gov>]

AOML Seminar

DATE:                  Thursday, January 24, 2013

TIME:                   2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. (Refreshments at

                                 1:45  p.m.)

LOCATION:      AOML Library - Second floor 

                                (Seating is very limited)

SPEAKER:        Professor Milton Halem
                                Research Professor, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering     
                                        Director, Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research,
                                        Director, Multicore Computational Center,
                                        College of Engineering and Information Technology
                                        University of Maryland, Baltimore County
                                        (and Bob Atlas' first boss in research)
                
TITLE:             "Global Decadal Trends of Greenhouse

                              Gases and Surface Temperature Linkages"

AOML Abstract. R. Goody et. al., J. Harries et. al., and more recently others have shown that changes in greenhouse gases can be detected in the spectrum of outgoing long and short wave

 radiation using climate model simulations as surrogates for observed radiances. Ohring et. al., has shown that accuracies of 0.01⁰K/yr are adequate to resolve inter-annual changes in brightness

 temperatures. In this talk, we present the first ever direct observations of global decadal trends of greenhouse gases and their linkages to surface temperatures. We compute the all-sky OLW

spectrum for 2378 spectral infrared channels of the AIRS instrument, launched in April, 2002, for every lat-lon grid cell covering the Earth at 2.0⁰x2.0⁰ and globally average these gridded

radiances from all the AIRS footprints. Decadal trends of increased GHGs are inferred from the AIRS spectra from Jan. 1, 2003-Dec. 31, 2012 indicating continued decreases in the trend of

Surface Brightness Temperatures (BT) of CO2 (14.15u and 4.3u), O3 BT (9.8u), CH4 BT (7.7u)  and slightly positive increases in the CFC11 and CFC12 BTs resp. of window channels at 8.7u

and 11.1u, in accordance with results of the Montreal Protocol. No significant trends are seen in the global water cycle between 7.38u and 6.38u. We show the decadal stability of the AIRS

instrument by comparisons with the MODIS IR spectral channels on the same satellite with views almost identical in space and time for 14 days in each September for 10 years. An annual BT

warming trend of ~0.7⁰K per decade is observed in the Arctic while global annual mean surface brightness temperature trends for the decade are essentially flat. An amplifying annual oscillation

in surface BT is observed in the Antarctic with inter-annual increases growing from 0.1⁰K to 0.4⁰K over a decade which is speculated to be related to the MJO. AIRS surface BT has an annual

correlation of 0.97with GISS Surface Temperatures (ST) and 0.82 with GISS monthly correlations, thus implying that surface BT can serve as a climate change proxy.

 

Biographical Sketch. Dr. Milton Halem is a Research Professor in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County since 2002. In addition, he is Director, of the NSF sponsored Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research. His main teaching and research areas of current interest are service oriented cloud computing, hybrid computational science, advanced information systems and data intensive computing. Prior to joining UMBC, Dr. Halem served from 1999 to 2002 as Assistant Director for Information Sciences and Chief Information Officer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. From 1984 to 1999 he served as Chief of the Earth and Space Data Computing Divison. He managed many of the most powerful scientific data intensive supercomputing centers.  He is nationally recognized for his research in simulation studies of space observing systems and four dimensional satellite data assimilation for weather and climate prediction. He acquired his Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from the City College of New York and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University in 1968. In 1999, Dr. Halem received an honorary Doctorate from Dalhousie University, CA in recognition for his contributions to the field of computational science. Dr. Halem is also a noted fine art screenprinter.