Hello group (hope my English is good enough to make myself understood)

as a retired physicist - prepareing some teaching on climate physics - who formerly worked on spectroscopy (hyperfinestructure - optical) and in astrophysics (planetary) including computer science - I found at least one major problem - not being clearly solved in the IPCC report (AR4):

how do you  calculate (?) or build (?) RF (for various GHG's) from RT ??

- I understand that there is no other way as to calculate RF by virtue of models. I downloaded some of them, namely ARTS (model version 2 from Lulea Technical University in Sweden) and got it running. The same holds for STREAMER.

 I tried some analysis ...

However it seems rather difficult to use them for "building" (calculation) RF (based on the spectroscopic absorption data of e.g. HITRAN or GEISA, the most famous datasets for absorption spectra).

Moreover, I recently got an Intel Quad Xeon computer (running on Debian Linux) - I hope this will be capable enough to do that calculation ... if that is the only way ...

 If anybody has a hint how to solve this problem I really would appreciate ... tia

Jorge

Barton Paul Levenson is a physicist who writes radiative transfer models (and some sci-fi).

His Climatology Pages are here:  http://bartonpaullevenson.com/Climatology.html

If you can't find specifically what you're looking for, you can try emailing him (he's pretty good about answering back):

levenson1960@gmail.com

Good luck,

The Yooper

Daniel,

BPL is a science fiction writer. He knows some physics, but it is going too far to describe him as a physicist.

My understanding was that he has a degree in physics.  If that is in error, I apologize. 

However, his climatology pages are often referenced at RC and Open Mind by others as being definitive.

BPL writes clearly, and his intellectual bent is correct; but among the RealClimate crowd, he does not stand out. There are several professionals who participate at RC. BPL is at best a talented amateur.

Thanks, Daniel, good hint - althoug nealjking says BPL is not a physicist. Possibly he can give me some hints.

 Btw: I realy do not quite understand why the experts are trying to draw me on the IPCC reports (AR4, TAR etc) - there definitely is a definition of RF - however nobody tells me - and at least I cannot find it - where to get the algorithms of computing RF from RT ... Well my impression is - and please correct me if I am wrong - the mainstream experts (I mean the IPCC people) seems to have barricaded themselves in a waggon fort ...

 kind regards

 Jorge

jorgepeine,

The calculations are calculationally intensive, and are based on a few papers written in the 1970's, I believe. I got a list of some papers from Gavin at Realclimate, but I don't know where it is right now. 

If Riccardo or someone else doesn't know the references, maybe another note to Gavin would elicit the references.

neal JKing  thanks ... it is true the math is not simple -- I am also looking for some papers from JGR - and GLetters - (which are not available to me due to library restrictions (in terms of cost) ...

if there is some opportunity from your side to get hold of those papers I's appreciate ...

Jorge