Cecilia Bitz (bitz[@]atmos.washington.edu) and Kyle Armour (karmour[@]u.washington.edu)
The scientific questions that will be studied:
-This theme will investigate radiative feedbacks and their role in polar climates, especially involving sea ice. Central questions for this theme are:
-How do radiative feedbacks depend on processes in the polar regions?
-How does the diversity of polar climate response among models depend on radiative feedbacks?
The processes that will be investigated:
-Radiative feedbacks (Planck, lapse rate, cloud, water vapor, and albedo, each for longwave and shortwave). The non cloud feedbacks can be evaluated for all sky and cloud-free conditions
The type of analyses that will be conducted:
-We will use methods, such as the kernel feedback methods, to compute radiative feedbacks. Radiative forcing will be estimated from fixed SST integrations.
References to earlier works
Soden et al 2008, Quantifying climate feedbacks using radiative kernels. Journal of Climate, V 21, p3504-3520.
