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Gettysburg National Military Park
Smoke Aerosols Impact MODIS Observations of Cloud Properties
Warren Wiscombe
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Climate and Radiation Branch, Greenbelt, MD
Time: 3:30 PM
Location: Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
Bldg. 33, Room H114
The Brouhaha over Enhanced Absorption of Sunlight by Clouds: What Went Wrong?
In 1995, based on observations and extrapolations, claims were made by a group of well-known scientists that clouds absorbed much more sunlight than any models could predict. This ignited a furor of debate which led in that same year to an aircraft field campaign, followed by several years of increasingly acerbic debate about the controversial results of that campaign. In 2000 a second field campaign was mounted to correct the oversights in the first one; the results satisfied neither side, but seemed to indicate that the 1995 claims were vastly overblown while at the same time radiation models still fell mysteriously short of perfection. In this talk, I will attempt to go beyond the details of this debate and ask, what, if anything, went wrong? Was science functioning poorly in this case, failing to filter out junk science? My answer will be, no, in fact it was operating to correct a severe distortion that had afflicted the radiation field, whereby theoreticians had more or less ignored field observations in favor of sitting behind their computer screens, while observationalists were too credulous about theoretical models and failed to challenge them. Both the models and the level of instrumental incisiveness suffered badly as a result of this lack of active engagement between theoreticians and observationalists, and "tool creation", the wellspring of much of science, languished. The field is in considerably better shape as a result of this enhanced absorption debate, and, oddly, almost all the warring parties agree about that. I will conclude by showing what has been learned from the debate that will endure.
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Click here for photos from the seminar
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