In the last three decades we have experienced the first close-up exploration of the planets of the solar system. American, Russian, and (increasingly) European planetary space missions have now explored the atmospheres and environments of many different worlds, returning data with which we can begin to understand the Earth in its wider context as never before. The new discipline of Comparative ...

Clouds are essential for life to exist on earth due to their influential climatological impact. Clouds help control the radiation balance of the earth by reflecting incoming solar radiation, a cooling process; however, clouds also act as absorbers of terrestrial infrared radiation, a warming process. This dual role is a primary motive to examine the effects clouds have on the global climate. Qu...

The NASA/JAXA Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) has been in operation for over 17 years since 1997. The length of TRMM is far shorter than those from ground observations, raising a question as to whether TRMM derived climatology products are good enough for research and applications. In this study, three climatologies derived from a blended product (the TRMM Multi-Satellite Precipitati...

I have just three minor comments. 1. I did not get a feeling for the significance of the results shown in Fig. 6 which show discrepancies between 3D and 2D magnetic field treatment of up to +/-7K in the tropics. This sounds a lot and makes me wonder if modelling from 2D is in fact useless for these higher channels. A question is how does this compare to variance with respect to climate in obser...

This paper discusses the state of European research in historical climatology. This field of science and an overview of its development are described in detail. Special attention is given to the documentary evidence used for data sources, including its drawbacks and advantages. Further, methods and significant results of historical-climatological research, mainly achieved since 1990, are presen...

Representation error arises from the inability of the forecast model to accurately simulate the climatology of the truth. We present a rigorous framework for understanding this kind of error of representation. This framework shows that the lack of an inverse in the relationship between the true climatology (true attractor) and the forecast climatology (forecast attractor) leads to the error of ...

Coastal flood hazard varies in response to changes in storm surge climatology and the sea level. Here we combine probabilistic projections of the sea level and storm surge climatology to estimate the temporal evolution of flood hazard. We find that New York City's flood hazard has increased significantly over the past two centuries and is very likely to increase more sharply over the 21st centu...

The study demonstrates that an incompatibility between a surface temperature climatology and a given ocean model, into which the climatology is assimilated via Haney restoration, can cause model ocean climate drift and interdecadal oscillations when the ocean is switched to a weaker restoration. This is made using an idealized Atlantic Ocean model driven by thermal and wind forcing only. Initia...

The Halogen Occultation Experiment (HALOE) on board the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) has observed mixing ratios of important trace species in the stratosphere for more than a decade since 1991. Here we present a climatology for the stratosphere compiled from HALOE O3, H2O, CH4, NOx, HCl, and HF data for the period from 1991 to 2002. In this approach, the data are averaged over equ...