GES Fall 2021 Virtual Seminar Series

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 08:02:56 -0400

The Department of Geography and Environmental Systems is once again hosting its Seminar Series this fall. Check CS3's Upcoming Events page and event calendar for dates, links, and seminar details as they become available. Recordings will be available on CS3's YouTube channel following the lectures.

Click here to join the lecture!

Wednesday, September 15th at noon

The recent IPCC assessment report, with a focus on the role of clouds and aerosols

Prof. Dr. Johannes Quaas

Theoretical Meteorology, University of Leipzig.

Abstract: The presentation will first provide some background on the IPCC process and summarize the headline conclusions of the report by Working Group I ("The Physical Science Basis") of the IPCC. It will show in some more detail the assessment of the Changing State of the Climate System (Chapter 2). In the second part, it will focus on the role of clouds and aerosols in climate change and present the key conclusions on this aspect. The effective forcing due to aerosols is now revised and better confined, and the cloud feedbacks are now assessed to be clearly of positive sign. The overall effective forcing well explains the observed climate change.

Dr. Johannes Quaas is University Professor for Theoretical Meteorology at Leipzig University (Germany). Previously he worked at three major climate modelling centres in Europe (Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, Paris, France; Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter, UK; Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany). His expertise is in the role of clouds in climate change, in particular the impact on clouds by anthropogenic aerosols. He works with atmospheric models but also satellite observations. Johannes was Lead author in the 6th Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.