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Author(s): Richard Bintanja (corresponding author) [1]; Roderik S.W. van de Wal [1]; Johannes Oerlemans [1] Marine records of sediment oxygen isotope compositions show that the Earth's climate has gone through [...]

A model of the Laurentide ice sheet was employed to study the release of massive icebergs into the North Atlantic Ocean, termed Heinrich events, and revealed that the state of the ice sheet determines the cooling effects and release events. The mass-balance computation for an ice sheet of a specific geometry suggests that the melting rate is greatly reduced during additional cooling whenever warm conditions affect a large ice sheet.

Records of glacier fluctuations compiled by the World Glacier Monitoring Service can be used to derive an independent estimate of global warming during the last 100 years. Records of different glaciers are made comparable by a two-step scaling procedure: one allowing for differences in glacier geometry, the other for differences in climate sensitivity. The retreat of glaciers during the last 100 years appears to be coherent over the globe. On the basis of modeling of the climate sensitivity of glaciers, the observed glacier retreat can be explained by a linear warming trend of 0.66 kelvin per century., As suggested by many historic records, valley glaciers are sensitive indicators of climatic change[1-5]. This large sensitivity is a consequence of the typical properties of a melting ice or snow [...]

A World Without Ice by Henry Pollack Avery: 2009. 304 pp. $26 A World Without Ice opens with a strong foreword from Al Gore: the science has been done--now we [...]

A simple form of the Prandtl model addressing pure katabatic flows is solved. The new analytic solution is valid for almost any assigned eddy diffusivity K(z) and constant Prandtl number. This model assumes a onedimensional steady state for momentum and heat balance. Its approximate solution, obtained using the WKB method, appears as a generalization and improvement of the classic analytic solution for the constant-K case. It is compared favorably against a numerical solution. A comparison with observations from PASTEX, Austria 1994, shows that the new solution is much closer to the data than the constant-K solution. The dynamics revealed with this new solution is discussed (relatively sharper near-surface profiles, their gradients, and the low-level jet), and a suggestion toward improving boundary layer parameterizations is offered.