ARL News

ARL Climate Trend Work Recognized By Discover Magazine

 

January 3, 2005

In its January 2005 issue, Discover Magazine lists its picks for the top 100 science stories of 2004. Their choice for the #1 story is the “Turning Point” on global warming, citing work by Fu et al. (reference below) who found a tropospheric warming trend in satellite data after removing the effects of stratospheric cooling. Dian Seidel of ARL was a co-author of the paper.

The magazine article states: “…Computer models can’t explain that trend without factoring in a man-made greenhouse effect, but skeptics have long argued that the models also can’t explain why the lower atmosphere has apparently warmed less than Earth’s surface. That argument took a knock in 2004. Reanalyzing the satellite temperature measurements, Qiang Fu of the University of Washington and his colleagues concluded that a cooling in the upper atmosphere had been masking what is in fact a large warming of the lower atmosphere”.

The full citation for the Fu et al. article is:

‘

Fu, Q., C.M Johanson, S.G. Warren, and D.J. Seidel, 2004: Contribution of stratospheric cooling to satellite-inferred tropospheric temperature trend, Nature, 249, 55-58.

Correspondence arising from the original publication is addressed in the following response:

Fu, Q., D.J. Seidel, C.M. Johanson, and S.G. Warren, 2004: Atmospheric science: Stratospheric cooling and the troposphere (reply), Nature, doi: 10.1038/nature03210.

Contact information: Bruce B. Hicks
Phone: (301) 713-0684
e-mail: bruce.hicks@noaa.gov