Join us for the in-person November Earth Observation Network meeting where Tristan L’Ecuyer from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will be presenting on ‘Documenting the Earth’s Emission Spectrum with PREFIRE’. The event takes place in the Grantham Boardroom, the presentation and Q&A will run from 4-5pm and the event is open to Imperial staff and students – please e-mail Neil Jennings if you would like to attend and state whether you plan to join in-person or online (via Teams).
Presentation details
While models and observations unequivocally confirm that the climate is warming in response to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, future projections of the associated impacts, including Arctic warming and the resultant ice sheet melt and sea level rise, remain uncertain. This can be attributed, in part, to a significant gap in current Earth observations. More than a century after Max Planck won the Nobel Prize in Physics for describing the spectral distribution of energy emitted from blackbodies, we have yet to fully characterize our planet’s emission spectrum. Despite representing more than half of Earth’s emission, wavelengths longer than 15 microns, termed the far infrared, have not been globally measured. NASA’s Polar Radiant Energy in the Far Infrared Experiment, or PREFIRE, mission aims to start to address this observing gap by using two CubeSats to map 95% of the energetically relevant portion of Earth’s emission spectrum, providing an unprecedented view of the planet’s effective emitting temperature at 64 wavelengths from 5 to 53 microns. The spectra collected by the identical Thermal InfraRed Spectrometers (TIRS) aboard the PREFIRE CubeSats will carry the signatures of the atmospheric and surface processes and feedbacks central to polar climate change. Estimates of spectral surface emissivity, water vapor, cloud properties, and the atmospheric greenhouse effect derived from these measurements offer the potential to advance models of thermal fluxes in the cold, dry conditions characteristic of the polar regions and upper atmosphere. PREFIRE will also serve as a precursor to the European Space Agency’s Far-Infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring (FORUM) mission, a larger platform that will make accurate, high spectral resolution measurements across an even broader range of wavelengths.
Biography
Tristan L’Ecuyer is a professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS) and director of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison). L’Ecuyer received his PhD at Colorado State University where he worked as a research scientist for 10 years prior to joining the AOS faculty at the UW-Madison in 2011.
His research leverages state-of-the-art satellite observations to address the pressing questions in climate science. L’Ecuyer’s research group is pioneering new methods for measuring rain and snow from space, determining the role clouds and pollution play in shaping the Earth’s climate, helping to realize the full potential of solar energy, and documenting the causes of rapid Arctic climate change. A central focus of this work is using global observations to improve the representation of clouds and atmospheric processes in climate models. L’Ecuyer also leads a NASA CubeSat mission called Polar Radian Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment (PREFIRE) that will measure thermal energy flows in polar regions with the goal of improving predicted rates of Arctic warming, sea ice loss, and ice sheet melt.