ComicCon for Geoscience Day 2: The Crow's take on the #Bjerkes #Charney Atmospheric Science talks at #agu11

Went to 2 of the hour invited talks today. Both excellent and thought provoking.

Bjerkes Lecture: Paul Newman The 2010 Ozone Assessment

Well there can be too much doom and gloom among scientists so we get a bit of a feel-good story inre: stratospheric ozone. The only monkey wrench on the horizon is the HFCs, which are not yet regulated. The good news is if we regulate them soon we will be OK, but if we do nothing in about 50 years we’ll be back to where we started in terms of ozone lost. Let’s get on this politicians.

• did you know there have been 6 amendments to the original Montreal Protocol.




• decreasing ozone is good for increasing Vitamin D production, but of course the long list of health issues associated with it means I stick to my 1g a day of D in the winter.




• no consensus on the term Northern Ozone Hole yet but the fact remains when it gets very cold in the Arctic winter stratosphere we will lose significant ozone similar to the South.

Charney Lecture, Graeme Stephens, Clouds & Climate Change

Excellent tour for the non specialist to the issues involved incorporating realistic cloud physics into global models. As an experimentalist I feel his pain in trying to communicate to the modeling community that sometimes you can’t do something a certain why because it is easy and/or efficient it if isn’t correct. Examples included the models producing (in certain situations) twice as much rain at half the amount of the measurements. Not really agreement

• Learned with a Taylor diagram is, new one for me.




• Nice example at end of the affect of mixed-phase clouds on forecast.

Poster time!