About this workshop

Earth’s Energy Imbalance (EEI) is a key quantity in climate science and an integrated measure of global climate warming: it represents the rate of planetary heat uptake in response to anthropogenic and natural radiative forcings and feedbacks. EEI is the globally and annually integrated net radiative flux at the top-of-the-atmosphere (TOA) – yet as basic as this quantity may appear, it is very challenging to measure and quantify directly. Current space radiometers measure the incoming and outgoing radiative fluxes at TOA, but their uncertainties are too large to derive the small residual net radiative flux with sufficient accuracy. Indirect methods take stock of heat content changes in ocean, atmosphere, land and the cryosphere, which requires immense, interdisciplinary, and coordinated community efforts and faces a multitude of observing system biases and gaps. In addition to the fundamental meaning for climate science, EEI is used to tune climate models, constrain radiometrically derived flux measurements, quantify meridional heat transports, and constrain global climate sensitivity.

The goal of this 2-day workshop is to sensitize the JPL Earth science and engineering community to the urgent need for EEI assessments and measurements, share and fully utilize NASA and other data to advance EEI assessments, and to foster collaboration between science and technology groups to use our unique resources for advances in Earth Energy balance space-observations and research.

The workshop features a variety of interdisciplinary talks and discusses pathways forward for indirect assessments and direct EEI measurement potentials. The workshop will produce a summary report, strengthen collaboration across groups, seed ideas for EVI/EVM mission proposals, and aims to kick-off related studies and publications on Earth’s Energy Imbalance and planetary heat storage.

Agenda

Preliminary Agenda (PDF)