Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Tuesday, November 04, 2014
Berkeley Lab scientists identify new driver behind Arctic warming
Scientists have identified a mechanism that could turn out to be a big contributor to warming in the Arctic region and melting sea ice.
The research was led by scientists from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). They studied a long-wavelength region of the electromagnetic spectrum called far infrared. It's invisible to our eyes but accounts for about half the energy emitted by the Earth's surface. This process balances out incoming solar energy.
Despite its importance in the planet's energy budget, it's difficult to measure a surface's effectiveness in emitting far-infrared energy. In addition, its influence on the planet's climate is not well represented in climate models. The models assume that all surfaces are 100 percent efficient in emitting far-infrared energy.
That's not the case. The scientists found that open oceans are much less efficient than sea ice when it comes to emitting in the far-infrared region of the spectrum. This means that the Arctic Ocean traps much of the energy in far-infrared radiation, a previously unknown phenomenon that is likely contributing to the warming of the polar climate.
Their research appears this week in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...more
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment