Brian V Smoliak

• Ph.D.
• Co-founder at Weathervane Labs LLC

Introduction Advances in farming technologies and practices have helped farmers to increase crop yields, but continued production increases – while needed to feed a growing global population – are being hindered by climate change and other environmental challenges. Kansas, a globally important region for wheat production, is already experiencing th...

Reservoir covers reduce evaporation, concentration of salt, and organic growth. If such covers are designed to reflect solar energy to space, subsidies to deploy them may be available. Water reflects a small fraction of incident solar energy and, in places where the sun is intense with few clouds, offer a high potential for reflecting solar energy...

Modifying Earth’s albedo is one of the strategies considered to reduce its energy imbalance and slow global warming by reflecting solar energy. Atmospheric contributions to reflected solar radiation through stratospheric aerosols or cloud brightening have received considerable attention; however, the efficacy of surface interventions is less unders...

Spontaneous, internally-generated variability of the climate system is pervasive. On the multidecadal time scale it dominates the variability of surface air temperature averaged over extratropical land areas as large as the contiguous United States, and it modulates the rate of rise of global mean temperature in response to the buildup of greenhous...

Data from a dense urban meteorological network (UMN) are analyzed, revealing the spatial heterogeneity and temporal variability of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota) canopy-layer urban heat island (UHI). Data from individual sensors represent surface air temperature (SAT) across a variety of local climate zones within a 5000-km2 area...

The leading patterns of variability of the monthly mean Northern Hemisphere (NH) sea level pressure (SLP) field, as derived from empirical orthogonal teleconnection (EOT) analysis of a 93-yr (1920-2012) record of NOAA-CIRES 20th Century Reanalyses, are presented and discussed, with emphasis on wintertime patterns. The analysis yields nine or more h...

The influence of atmospheric circulation changes reflected in spontaneously occurring sea level pressure (SLP) anomalies upon surface air temperature (SAT) variability and trends is investigated using partial least squares (PLS) regression, a statistical method that seeks to maximally explain covariance between a predictand time series or field and...

This study highlights the relative importance of internally generated versus externally forced climate trends over the next 50 yr (2010-60) at local and regional scales over North America in two global coupled model ensembles. Both ensembles contain large numbers of integrations (17 and 40): each of which is subject to identical anthropogenic radia...

A suite of the historical simulations run with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC AR4) models forced by greenhouse gases, aerosols, stratospheric ozone depletion, and volcanic eruptions and a second suite of simulations forced by increasing CO(2) concentrations alone are compared with observations for the r...

The dominant patterns of Indian Summer Monsoon Rainfall (ISMR) and their relationships with the sea surface temperature and 850-hPa wind fields are examined using gridded datasets from 1900 on. The two leading empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs) of ISMR over India are used as basis functions for elucidating these relationships. EOF1 is highly cor...

The Earth has warmed at an unprecedented pace in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s (IPCC in Climate change 2007: the scientific basis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007). In Wu et al. (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104:14889–14894, 2007) we showed that the rapidity of the warming in the late twentieth century was a result of concurrence of a se...

A two-hundred year instrumental record of annual surface air temperature (SAT) in the Atlantic - Arctic boundary region was reconstructed from four station-based composite time series (Fig. 1). Credibility is supported by ice core records, other temperature proxies, and historical evidence. This record (designated TNA) provides new perspective on p...

A two-hundred year instrumental record of annual surface air temperature in the Atlantic-Arctic boundary region was reconstructed from four station-based composite time series. The new time series adds seventy-six years to the previously available record. Credibility is supported by ice core records, other temperature proxies, and historical eviden...

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions change earth's climate by altering the planet's radiative balance. An important first step in mitigation of climate change is to reduce annual increases in these emissions. However, the many suggested means of limiting emissions rates have led to few actual changes in policy or behavior. This disconnection can...

Application of the method of partial least squares (PLS) regression to geophysical data is illustrated with two cases: (1) finding sea level pressure patterns over the North Pacific associated with dynamically-induced winter-to-winter variations in snowpack in the Cascade mountains of western Washington state and (2) finding patterns of sea surface...