CliMAS colloquia

View Full Calendar

Seminar coordinator for Spring 2025 is Sonia Lasher-Trapp, slasher@illinois.edu

Seminar Speaker: Professor Da Yang, UChicago

Event Type
Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor
Professor Cristian Proistosescu
Location
2079 NHB
Virtual
Join online
Date
Nov 5, 2024   3:30 pm  
Views
74

Spice in the Air

 The molar mass of water vapor is lower than that of dry air, making humid air lighter at the same temperature and pressure. This vapor buoyancy effect has often been considered negligible and overlooked in large-scale climate dynamics. However, our study shows that vapor buoyancy significantly impacts atmospheric circulations, planetary energy balance, cloud cover, and land surface temperatures. For instance, vapor buoyancy causes rising air to be, on average, colder than sinking air in the tropical free troposphere. Notably, some state-of-the-art climate models fail to represent vapor buoyancy properly. This flaw leads to inaccurate simulations of cloud distributions—the largest uncertainty in predicting climate change.

link for robots only