讲座简介

The water vapor in the lower stratosphere strongly influences the Earth radiation budget and climate. It remains a concern that the distribution of water vapor in this region is poorly observed. In this work, we integrate high-resolution numerical modeling with satellite observations to investigate how deep convection influences the lower stratospheric water vapor distribution. First, strong overshooting convective events are simulated using the Global Environmental Multiscale model (GEM) with self-nested domains at up to 0.25 km resolution. Our analysis is focused on the water vapor transport and distribution in the lower stratosphere, which is validated against collocated satellite and aircraft measurements. Second, we use satellite observations to detect and assess the impact of the deep convection on lower stratospheric humidity. We aim at developing a novel technique to retrieve the water vapor distribution in the lower stratosphere using nadir-view infrared spectrometers, which have smaller footprint size and higher vertical resolution than the instruments currently used for stratospheric water vapor sounding and thus are advantageous for investigating the convective impacts.

主讲人简介

Dr. Huang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at McGill University. He obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2008 and was a U.S./NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University before joining the McGill faculty in 2011. Dr. Huang’s research aims at understanding atmospheric radiation and applying it in atmospheric remote sensing. His work has advanced radiative transfer theories and improved our understanding of the radiative forcing, such as the logarithmic dependency of CO2 forcing, its spatial distribution and implications.