Sunday, 11 January 2009
Observing tropical ice as an intraseasonal oscillation variable
Phoenix Convention Center
Ice observed in the tropics, usually in the form of cirrus or high cumulonimbus clouds, has a significant effect on the global energy budget because they control the longwave energy budget at the tropopause. The Moderate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument onboard NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites is used in this project to study the spatial and time varying characteristics of cloud ice water path and cloud ice fraction. The ultimate purpose of this research is to observe the correlation between a standard intraseasonal oscillation variable, tropospheric temperature. Future work will include subsetting the data according to dates of peak tropospheric temperature, studying the evolution of convective ice with respect to mid-/upper-tropospheric temperature, and performing a regional case study within the subtropical range.
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