Aerosols: a collection of airborne solid or liquid particles, with a typical size between 0.01 and 10 μm, that reside in the atmosphere for at least several hours. Aerosols may be of either natural or anthropogenic origin. Aerosols may influence climate in two ways: directly through scattering and absorbing radiation, and indirectly through acting as condensation nuclei for cloud formation or modifying the optical properties and lifetime of clouds.(1)
Albedo: the fraction of solar radiation reflected by a surface or object, often expressed as a percentage. Snow covered surfaces have a high albedo; the albedo of soils ranges from high to low; vegetation covered surfaces and oceans have a low albedo. The Earth’s albedo varies mainly through varying cloudiness, snow, ice, leaf area and land cover changes.(1)
Algorithm: a computer program (or set of programs) which is designed to systematically solve a certain kind of problem.(www.geographic.org)
Anomaly: the departure of an element from its long-period average value for the location concerned. For example, if the maximum temperature for June in Melbourne was 1° C higher than the long-term average for this month, the anomaly would be +1°C. The current international standard is to use the 30 year average from 1961 to 1990 as the long-term average. (Bureau of Meteorology, Australian government)
Anthropogenic activities: activities characteristic of human societies, such as industry, agriculture, livestock breeding, construction, etc. (3)
Aquifer: porous or permeable terrain that allows water to collect underground.
Binocular viewer: a device that mimics human sight by using two sources to capture an image, allowing for a threedimensional (3D) field of depth. (3)
Biomass: total dry weight of all living organisms that can be supported at each trophic level in a food chain. Materials that are biological in origin, including organic material (living and dead) from above and below ground, for example, trees, crops, grasses, tree litter, roots, animals and animal waste. (2)
Characterise/characterisation: analytical process determining the composition and classification of the elements that make up a whole.
Climate feedback: a process by which one climate process can initiate another, which in turn will affect the first. Positive feedback effects increase the intensity of the first process, negative ones decrease it. (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
Climate scenario: a plausible and often simplified representation of the future climate, based on an internally consistent set of climatological relationships that has been constructed for explicit use in investigating the potential consequences of anthropogenic climate change, often serving as input to impact models. Climate projections often serve as the raw material for constructing climate scenarios, but climate scenarios usually require additional information such as about the observed current climate. A climate change scenario is the difference between a climate scenario and the current climate. (1)
Climatology: meteorology is the study of day-by-day variations in the weather. Climatology, in contrast, is the study of long-term weather patterns and variations, usually over a number of years. It is concerned with both the description of climate and the analysis of the causes of climatic differences, and more recently climate changes and their practical consequences. (Web Manchester Metropolitan University)
Convection: the transfer of heat through the circular movement of unevenly heated matter, as when air molecules rise in the atmosphere when warmed. (3) Coupling: the linkage of two systems in which there is an interaction or transfer of energy. (3)
Coriolis force: the force that deflects the path of the wind on account of Earth rotation. The path of the wind is deflected to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere. Michael E. Ritter University of Wisconsin).
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