Atmospheric Science

Remembering Yesterday, Understanding Today, Anticipating Tomorrow

- Overview

Our world is changing at an accelerating rate. The global human population has grown from 6.1 billion to 7.1 billion in the last 15 years and is projected to reach 11.2 billion by the end of the century. The distribution of humans across the globe has also shifted, with more than 50 percent of the global population now living in urban areas, compared to 29 percent in 1950. 

Along with these trends, increasing energy demands, expanding industrial activities, and intensification of agricultural activities worldwide have in turn led to changes in emissions that have altered the composition of the atmosphere. 

Atmospheric Science focuses on the whole domain of research related to the physics, dynamics, and chemistry of the Earth's atmosphere, including both basic and applied research. 

- The Main Branches of Atmospheric Science

The main branches of Atmospheric Science are: 

• Meteorology and Atmospheric Dynamics: It involves the study of air motions that lead to thunderstorms, frontal systems, hurricanes and tornadoes. 
• Atmospheric Physics: It applies principles of physics to study atmospheric processes such as cloud formation, light scattering and energy transfer. 
• Atmospheric Chemistry: It applies principles of chemistry to study atmospheric processes such as air pollution, ozone depletion, and aerosol formation. 
• Climate Science: it studies changes in the statistics of weather from seasons to millennia and longer, addressing phenomena as such as El Niño, global warming, and the ice ages.

Atmospheric scientists pay more attention to the following areas, among others: quantitative and deductive aspects of the physics, dynamics, and chemistry of the atmosphere, applied research related to satellite meteorology, radar meteorology, boundary layer processes, air pollution and its relationship with climate, agricultural and forest meteorology, and applied numerical meteorological models. 

- Artificial intelligence (AI) in Atmospheric Science

Atmospheric science is the study of weather analysis and predictability, climate and global change, the circulation of the atmosphere relating to weather systems and their impact on the Earth, air quality, and other atmospheric processes that affect us.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is used in atmospheric science to make weather predictions, climate modeling, and environmental monitoring:

• Weather predictions: AI enables meteorologists to use complex weather models that take in vast quantities of data to make more accurate forecasts.
• Climate modeling: AI is used in climate modeling.
• Environmental monitoring: AI is used in environmental monitoring.

Other organizations that use AI in atmospheric science include:

• NOAA Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI): Supports new and ongoing projects that span from the bottom of the ocean to the outer atmosphere.
• NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography (AI2ES): Creates trustworthy AI for environmental science.
• Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems (AIES): Publishes research on the development and application of methods in AI, machine learning, data science, and statistics that is relevant to meteorology, atmospheric science, hydrology, climate science, and ocean sciences.

- Climate Engineering (Climate Geoengineering)

Climate engineering or geoengineering in general is the deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth's climate system. The main category of climate engineering is solar geoengineering or solar radiation management. Solar geoengineering, or solar radiation modification, reflects some sunlight (solar radiation) back into space to limit or reverse human-caused climate change.

[More to come ...]