Join leading experts and scientists to explore our planet from space and learn how Earth observations are used to monitor climate change. Aimed at a broad audience, this course takes participants through five themed weeks with online lectures, quizzes, and the chance to engage in discussions with the course educators and other learners.

The course can help decision makers, policy makers, educators and communicators, to gain a better insight into how satellite data can help them assess the state of our climate and its changes, in order to support climate science, and adaptation and mitigation decisions.

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The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
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Application deadline: 15 December 2015

A selection of new science articles from the past week of interest to the SPARC community (a SPARC Office choice).

Comparison of the CMAM30 data set with ACE-FTS and OSIRIS: polar regions. By D. Pendlebury et al. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

Tropical sources and sinks of carbonyl sulfide observed from space. By N. Glatthor et al. in Geophysical Research Letters.

A breath of fresh air. [Editorial]. Nature.

Discussion papers – open for comment

A Joint data record of tropospheric ozone from Aura-TES and MetOp-IASI. By H. Oetjen et al in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions.

The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached yet another new record high in 2014, says WMO.

According to the latest WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, between 1990 and 2014 there was a 36% increase in radiative forcing – the warming effect on our climate – because of long-lived greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O) from industrial, agricultural and domestic activities.

Find the WMO Media Release (issued 9 November 2015).

Find the WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.

A selection of new science articles from the past week of interest to the SPARC community (a SPARC Office choice).

Wintertime atmospheric response to Atlantic multidecadal variability: effect of stratospheric representation and ocean–atmosphere coupling. By Y. Peings and G. Magnusdottir in Climate Dynamics.

Synoptic-Scale Behavior of the Extratropical Tropopause Inversion Layer. By R.P. Kedzierski et al. in Geophysical Research Letters.

Methyl chloride as a tracer of tropical tropospheric air in the lowermost stratosphere inferred from IAGOS-CARIBIC passenger aircraft measurements. By T. Umezawa et al. in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

An assessment of upper-troposphere and lower-stratosphere water vapor in MERRA, MERRA2 and ECMWF reanalyses using Aura MLS observations. By J.H. Jiang et al. in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

Methane and nitrous oxide retrievals from MIPAS-ENVISAT. By J. Plieninger et al. in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques.

Evaluation of methods for gravity wave extraction from middle-atmospheric lidar temperature measurements. By B. Ehard et al. in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques.

Did the 2011 Nabro eruption affect the optical properties of ice clouds? By A. Meyer et al. in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

Discussion papers – open for comment

Carbon monoxide climatology derived from the trajectory mapping of global MOZAIC-IAGOS data. By M. Osman et al. in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions.

Climatic impacts of stratospheric geoengineering with sulfate, black carbon and titania injection. By A.C. et al. in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions.

Drivers of changes in stratospheric and tropospheric ozone between year 2000 and 2100. By A. Banerjee et al. in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions.

A selection of new science articles from the past week of interest to the SPARC community (a SPARC Office choice).

Seasonal winter forecasts and the stratosphere. By A.A. Scaife et al. in Atmospheric Science Letters.

Water vapor stratification and dynamical warming behind the sharpness of the Earth’s mid-latitude tropopause. By A.P. Ferreira in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.

Spatial mapping of ground-based observations of total ozone. By K.-L. Chang et al. in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques.

Solar signals in CMIP-5 Simulations: Effects of Atmosphere–ocean Coupling. By S. Misios et al. in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.

Impacts of high-latitude volcanic eruptions on ENSO and AMOC. By F.S.R. Pausata in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Airborne measurements of organic bromine compounds in the Pacific tropical tropopause layer. By M.A. Navarro et al. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Atlantic hurricane surge response to geoengineering. By J.C. Moore et al. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Solar geoengineering using solid aerosol in the stratosphere. By D.K. Weisenstein et al. in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

Stratospheric geoengineering impacts on El Niño/Southern Oscillation. By C.J. Gabriel and A. Robock in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

Radiative Impacts of the 2011 Abrupt Drops in Water Vapor and Ozone in the Tropical Tropopause Layer. By D.M. Gilford et al. in the Journal of Climate.

Enhanced long-range forecast skill in boreal winter following stratospheric strong vortex conditions. By O.P. Tripathi et al. in Environmental Research Letters.

Discussion papers – open for comment

Upper-tropospheric humidity changes under constant relative humidity. By K. Gierens and K. Eleftheratos in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions.

A stable and large vortex, concentric around the south pole and characterised by low temperatures explains why 2015 experiences the largest ozone hole since 2006.

Find WMO Antarctic Ozone Bulletin (published on 29. October 2015).

Deadline for abstract submission: 1 February 2016
Deadline for registration: 21 April 2016

The workshop theme is the stratospheric sulfur burden and seeks to address questions like:

What can be established through gas and particle phase measurements?

What processes are instrumental in causing variations in the stratospheric sulfur burden, e. g. volcanoes, the summer Asian monsoon, and other processes that lead to cross-tropopause transport?

How well are these processes captured by measurements and by models?

First results of the SSiRC Model and data Intercomparison Project will also be discussed. While contributions on a range of topics around the broad theme of stratospheric sulfur and its role in climate are welcome, the workshop will be organized around the following primary themes:

The sulfur burden

• Measurements of gas precursors (e.g., SO2, COS)
• Measurements of particle phase sulfur in the stratosphere and upper troposphere
• Analyses of changes and interannual variability of these components
• Climate model sulfur burden and the processes affecting its partitioning

Volcanoes and stratospheric aerosol variability

• The impact of sulfur injection into the stratosphere by volcanic eruptions on climate
• How well do global aerosol models do in reproducing observations from the last decades?
• Preparing for the next major volcanic eruption: How well do models reproduce the effects from past large eruptions and how can they be improved? What measurements are needed? How do we do it?

The upper troposphere/lower stratosphere (UTLS)

• The role of the Summer Asian Monsoon in the UTLS aerosol budget
• Studies of the climate response to variations in UTLS aerosol
• Process studies of sulfur chemistry, gas to particle conversion, microphysics and aerosol removal and the interactions with dynamics and transport in the tropical troposphere, the Tropical Tropopause Layer and the global UTLS and parameterization schemes for these processes suitable for global models.

The meeting occurs the week following the EGU as a convenience to those travelling from outside Europe who may wish to attend both. A SSiRC related session for the EGU (led by Graham Mann) has been proposed.

Find more details on the SSiRC website.

Please address questions to Larry Thomason or Stefanie Kremser.

A selection of new science articles from the past week of interest to the SPARC community (a SPARC Office choice).

Relative drifts and biases between six ozone limb satellite measurements from the last decade. By N. Rahpoe et al in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques.

Weather chains during the 2013/2014 winter and their significance for seasonal prediction. By H.W. Davies in Nature Geoscience.

Southward shift of the northern tropical belt from 1945 to 1980. By S. Brönniman et al. in Nature Geoscience.

Increase in HFC-134a emissions in response to the success of the Montreal Protocol. By A. Fortems-Cheiney et al in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

A perturbed parameter model ensemble to investigate Mt. Pinatubo’s 1991 initial sulfur mass emission. By J.X. Sheng et al. in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

Transport pathways of peroxyacetyl nitrate in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere from different monsoon systems during the summer monsoon season. By S. Fadnavis et al. in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

The detectability of climate engineering. By G. Bürger and U. Cubasch in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

On the comparison between seasonal predictive skill of global circulation models: coupled versus uncoupled. By A.F. Beraki et al. in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

Positive trends in Southern Hemisphere carbonyl sulfide (OCS). By S. Kremser et al. in Geophysical Research Letters.

Zonally uniform tidal oscillations in the tropical stratosphere. By T. Sakazaki et al. in Geophysical Research Letters.

The direct fitting approach for total ozone column retrievals: a sensitivity study on GOME-2/MetOp-A measurements. By A. Wassmann et al. in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques.

Influences of source conditions on mountain wave penetration into the stratosphere and mesosphere. By B. Kaifler et al. in Geophysical Research Letters.

Ozone depletion by hydrofluorocarbons. By M.M. Hurwitz et al. in Geophysical Research Letters.

Modelling marine emissions and atmospheric distributions of halocarbons and dimethyl sulfide: the influence of prescribed water concentration vs. prescribed emissions. By S.T. Lennartz et al. in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

Discussion papers – open for comment

A Lagrangian description on the troposphere-to-stratosphere transport changes associated with the stratospheric water drop around the year 2000. By F. Hasebe and T. Noguchi in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions.

Variational data assimilation for the optimized ozone initial state and the short-time forecasting. By S.-Y. Park et al. in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions.

Abstract submission deadline is 15 November.

The German SPARC group, Stratospheric Change and its Role in Climate Prediction (SHARP), is organising a workshop which aims at addressing relevant issues of stratospheric change, the interaction between atmospheric chemistry and climate change, and the implications for climate and weather in observations and model studies.

Find more information at http://www.sharp2016.de.