Monday Morning, coming down... 85 down ? 1000 to go... Rivers of Air... Proxy Fruvious? #agu11

The Crow is rapidly going to summarize the morning before total fatigue sets in (this use to take until Thursday, not 1300 Monday?). My promise to walk the entire poster hall and report on Monday is on track, except it is now Monday Dec 12. I did get to #85 this morning. To whit.

Note: a lot of posters I go to and find interesting are in areas that I know little about, which are most areas, so pre-apologies for the misrepresentations of your hard work below.

Union posters

• 8: Dogma is that mineral dust when blown by wind get smaller as the wind gets stronger. This poster looked at many different measurements and concluded they are not consistent with this, the size does not depend on wind.




• 11: affect of deep convection on dust storm in west Africa in the summer. Looks like ½ the dust is associated with cold pool outflows of air called haboobs. OK, I just wanted to type haboobs.




• 16, 18, this group of Union posters were about media, including one about NCAR outreach and another on a general “model” for effective ways to set up exhibits at a science museum.




• U13A-0035 As always Dick Peltier from U Toronto has some interesting work he is doing with collaborator Liu. The had made a “soft” Snowball Earth model, i.e. the equatorial regions still have liquid water. However, there model had a very simple atmosphere. They are trying to improve the atmospheric model to find the point at which the system goes from soft to hard snowball.

Atmospheric

• A11 46 to 52 (or so): series of posters on the CALWater campaign that introduced your Crow to the atmospheric phenomena of a atmospheric river (AR). ARs are low atmosphere (2-4 km altitude) regions of rapidly moving air with high water vapor content, which occur at mid-latitudes and apparently in the sub-tropics as well. The have widths of 400 to 1000 km and move an amount of water per s 17x greater than leaving the Mississippi River discharge. In laymans terms that is a lot of water. Actually it is in scienctific terms as well. Another poster estimated that half the water in the Sierra Madre water basin is from these events. The ARs can interact with cyclones and/or orography and cause extremely heavy precipitation. Will have to look at our lidar water vapor measurements and see if we have encountered these and not realized it.




• 65: Utah State Aggie almnus Durga Kafle is now at Argonne National lab working with the ARM program micropulsed lidars. His posters showed the value of these small lidars for continuous, long-term and eye safe measurements of aerosol optical depth. I need to find out if Mike Fromm knows about this data source.




• 66-67 I found these posters terrifying but only because I may not know lots but I know enough geophysics to be terrified of the concept (let allow actual application) of geo-engineering. But then I teach first year physics to engineers. Sorry people, but to me this is asking for the atmospheric equivalent of cane toads. Thes posters describe techniques to implement the Latham Satter cloud albedo modification scheme, where clouds are generated over the oceans to give a global rise in albedo of 1%.




• 82 Dr. Hui Su at JPL is doing some interest modelling of UTLS (upper troposphere lower stratosphere) water vapor. Since we make these measurements both with the PCL but in concert with many other lidars as part of the Network for Detection of Atmospheric Composition and Chemistry (NDACC) it was a good exchange, we need to interact with the modellers and vice versa as this problem is an important long term issue for Atmospheric Change research.

that’s it for now, I have a few 1000 more to cover before dinner.