People are inundated with advice on how to reduce their carbon footprints. With many ideas, some of them contradictory, it’s easy to become overwhelmed.

Which measures are scientifically sound and most effective? How much leverage do people really have to reduce global warming and adapt to its effects?

Diane Pataki, associate professor of Earth system science, will address these questions during a breakfast lecture 7:30-9 a.m. Tuesday, May 18, at the Student Center. Here, she discusses her research and previews her talk.

UC Irvine Undergraduates in the Department of Earth System Science are invited to the 2010-2011 Welcome Lunch!

Come talk to the ESS professors and meet your fellow Earth and Environmental Science and Earth and Environmental Studies students!

Number of participants: 45

Number of people actively debating: 6

Vivacity of discussion: 2.5

Number of participants: 38

Number of people actively debating: 8

Vivacity of discussion: 2.8

Number of participants: 41

Number of people actively debating: 16

The convection-coupled tropical systems exhibit multiscale characters across a wide range of scales in space and time as a result of the complex interactions among its component systems and hierarchical regulations imposed by the operating environment. The representation of tropical convection in numerical models has long been recognized as the critical barrier in weather and climate predictions. This talk starts by tracing some of the great ideas influencing the current approaches to understand these complex systems since the 1960s.

Cloud processes and properties remain crudely represented in numerical weather and climate models, which is the leading cause of large uncertainties in the predicted variables. The observed vertical distributions of cloud water content from current A-train multi-sensors have provided the models with critical constraints on cloud/convective parameterizations and physics. However, the investigations are mostly limited to statistical or climatological analyses, because these measurements are confined in a 2D (curtain or nadir) view.