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New Horizons in Occultation Research pp 247–259Cite as

Trend Indicators of Atmospheric Climate Change Based on Global Climate Model Scenarios

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Abstract

The upper troposphere-lower stratosphere (UTLS) region is reacting particularly sensitive to climate change and variations of its key parameters are very good candidates for the monitoring and diagnosis of climate change. This study aims at revealing the most promising atmospheric climate change indicators in this region which are accessible by radio occultation (RO) observations. RO based climatologies show the highest data quality in the UTLS. Due to the availability of continuous RO data only since the end of 2001, longer-term climatologies of three representative global climate models were investigated in this respect. We demonstrate that the RO method can valuably contribute to climate monitoring by providing climatologies of a set of atmospheric parameters such as refractivity, geopotential height, and temperature, which differ in sensitivity at different heights and in different regions and cover the UTLS as a whole.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    World Climate Research Programme’s (WCRP’s) Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM)

  2. 2.

    esg.llnl.gov:8080/home/publicHomePage.do, 11/2007

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the modeling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) and the WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP3 multi-model dataset. Support of this dataset is provided by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy. This work was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) Project INDICATE P18733-N10.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change (WegCenter) and Institute for Geophysics, Astrophysics, and Meteorology (IGAM), University of Graz, Graz, Austria

    B.C. Lackner, A.K. Steiner, F. Ladstädter & G. Kirchengast

Authors
  1. B.C. Lackner
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  2. A.K. Steiner
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  3. F. Ladstädter
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  4. G. Kirchengast
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to B.C. Lackner .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Fak. Naturwissenschaften, Universität Graz, Halbärthgasse 1, Graz, 8010, Austria

    Andrea Steiner

  2. Wegener Zentrum für Klima und, Universität Graz, Leechgasse 25, Graz, 8010, Austria

    Barbara Pirscher

  3. Inst. für Geophysik, Astrophysik und, Universität Graz, Universitätsplatz 5, Graz, 8010, Austria

    Ulrich Foelsche

  4. Inst. für Geophysik, Astrophysik und, Universität Graz, Universitätsplatz 5, Graz, 8010, Austria

    Gottfried Kirchengast

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Lackner, B., Steiner, A., Ladstädter, F., Kirchengast, G. (2009). Trend Indicators of Atmospheric Climate Change Based on Global Climate Model Scenarios. In: Steiner, A., Pirscher, B., Foelsche, U., Kirchengast, G. (eds) New Horizons in Occultation Research. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00321-9_20

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