Publications by authors named "Laura D Riihimaki"
The Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) was a yearlong expedition supported by the icebreaker R/V Polarstern, following the Transpolar Drift from October 2019 to October 2020. The campaign documented an annual cycle of physical, biological, and chemical processes impacting the atmosphere-ice-ocean system. Of central importance were measurements of the thermodynamic and dynamic evolution of the sea ice.
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- High-latitude surface energy budgets (SEBs) are important for understanding land-climate interactions in the Arctic, but uncertainties in their predictions remain.
- A study analyzed SEB observations from 1994 to 2021 and found that vegetation type is a key predictor of SEB components during Arctic summers, often matching or exceeding differences seen between vegetation and glacier surfaces.
- The study also revealed that the timing of SEB fluxes varies significantly with vegetation type, affecting snow-cover dynamics and suggesting that better representations of Arctic vegetation in models could enhance future Earth system predictions.
Aerosol optical depth (AOD) characterizes the aerosol burden in the atmosphere, while its wavelength dependence is a sign of particle size. Long-term records of wavelength-resolved AOD with high quality and suitable continuity are required for climate change assessment. Typically, climate-related studies use AOD products provided by several, and perhaps different, ground-based instruments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHeterogeneity in warm-season (May-August) land-atmosphere (LA) coupling is quantified with the long-time, multiple-station measurements from the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program and the moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite remote sensing at the Southern Great Plains (SGP).
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