Yi Huang

McGill University

14:30, December 17, 2024

Room 912, IAP Building 2

Bio:

Yi Huang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at McGill University, Canada. His research is focused on climate physics and atmospheric radiation. He obtained his Ph.D. at Princeton University and was a Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University before joining the faculty at McGill University. He is currently the PI of the Greenhouse Gas-Montreal project aimed to measure the 3-D distributions of greenhouse gases at the city-level, and a Sciences & Applications co-Lead of a Canadian Satellite mission, High-altitude Aerosols, Water vapour and Clouds (HAWC).

Abstract:

Accurate knowledge of radiative forcing is a prerequisite for predicting climate change. One outstanding uncertainty of radiative budget originates from the stratosphere, for example, due to the radiative forcing of stratospheric water vapor. Most global climate models project a strong stratospheric moistening during global warming, although our understanding of its effect in turn on the warming continues to evolve. This is mostly due to the complications of the atmospheric adjustment process. I will discuss the adjustment process, with a focus on the radiatively driven atmospheric temperature adjustments in both the stratosphere and troposphere, and with a reference to the exceptional case of the 2022 Hunga volcano eruption, which injected a historical amount of water vapor into the stratosphere and stimulated such intriguing questions as whether it accounted for the global warming spike observed in the summer of 2023.