Speaker: Dr. Lee Anne Willson (ISU)

Title: Energy Balance and Radiative Transfer in Earth’s Atmosphere: An astronomer’s perspective
 

Abstract:
     It’s hard to believe what you can’t understand. We ask people to believe predictions about the future based on complex models of Earth’s atmosphere, and to make changes in their lives in response to these predictions. Is there a way to get at the essential physics of the greenhouse effect without getting lost in a maze of details?  Calling on decades of experience teaching stellar atmospheres, I will use elements from detailed climate models that accurately describe Earth’s climate now, and will examine what we can learn by applying elements of radiative transfer theory to the energy balance derived from these models. We will also look at the information contained in direct measures of transmittance in the Earth’s atmosphere. The goal is to derive an order-of-magnitude estimate for the impact of rising CO₂ levels from a simplified model that reproduces essential elements of detailed studies.