Aerosol–cloud interactions
Airborne particles change how clouds form and reflect sunlight. How much cooling do those changes produce, across different clouds and weather conditions?
Climate and atmosphere
Past climate shifts, cloud feedbacks, atmospheric mixing and the future of ice sheets.
Subjects: Climate and atmosphere
Problems in this collection
7 problemsLow-cloud climate feedback
How will low clouds change under sustained warming, and how will that change affect Earth’s energy balance?
Atmospheric turbulence
Air contains interacting eddies over an enormous range of sizes. How can their combined effect on heat, momentum, and pollutants be predicted reliably?
Marine ice-cliff instability
A tall Antarctic ice cliff could break up faster than ice flows forward. Whether this can sustain accelerating retreat depends on competing deformation and failure processes.
Mid-Pleistocene transition
Why did the dominant rhythm of ice ages change about a million years ago?
Dansgaard–Oeschger events
What drove Greenland’s repeated rapid warmings during the last ice age?
Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum carbon sources
Which carbon sources triggered and amplified the rapid warming about 56 million years ago?