Posted in 2017

Rose group @ AGU!

Our climate dynamics group will be traveling in New Orleans next week to share some recent research and catch up with all our colleagues at the AGU Fall Meeting 2017!

Here are abstract numbers and links for all our contributions:

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1000 miles of e-biking and carbon emissions

Back in April 2017 I bought a brand-new Trek XM 700+. It’s an e-bike with a small electric motor and lithium-ion battery pack that helps me keep up with traffic, climb hills, and battle headwinds with ease. I bought this beautiful but expensive machine in order to spend less time driving and more time biking.

I have always loved riding bikes, but the 15 mile round-trip commute between my home in Delmar and the UAlbany campus was a challenge for me. On my old road bike, I was rarely doing more than 2 days a week of bike commuting. That’s partly because my body complained about it, and partly because my commute time was substantially longer on bike than in the car (and I usually arrived at work pretty much soaked in sweat).

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New paper by Rose, Cronin and Bitz on exoplanet ice cover at low and high obliquity

Brian’s latest paper (with colleagues Tim Cronin from MIT and Cecilia Bitz from UW) is called “Ice Caps and Ice Belts: the effects of obliquity on ice-albedo feedback”. It has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. The paper looks at the basic rules governing planetary ice extent on Earth-like exoplanets at different obliquities. Click here for a preprint of the accepted manuscript.

Obliquity is the angle of a planet’s axis of rotation relative to its orbital plane. On Earth that angle is about 23.5º, and among other things, is the reason we have seasons. Something funny happens for planets at obliquity angles exceeding 55º. When you average over a whole year, the total amount of sunlight is largest at the poles and smallest at the equator.

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Cameron Rencurrel completes his MS thesis

Cameron Rencurrel has successfully completed and defended his thesis for the MS (Master of Science) degree, and is the second graduate from our group! Cameron is staying to continue on to his PhD.

Cameron’s thesis is entitled Understanding Climatic Adjustments to Variations in Tropical Ocean Heat Transport. It is a follow-up study to Rose and Ferreira (2013, J. Climate). The tropical oceans take up vast amounts of energy through air-sea heat fluxes, especially in the equatorial regions dominated by wind-driven upwelling of cold water. Over long time periods, this tropical heat uptake is roughly balanced by heat release from the ocean to the atmosphere in other regions closer to the poles.

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