Daniel Kirk-Davidoff Note: In January 2003, I will be joining the Department of Meteorology at the University of Maryland, College Park, as an assistant professor.
I'm a research associate in climate dynamics at Harvard. I'm currently working on several topics related to the sensitivity of the Earth's climate to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations.
I am analysing data from a mission to the tropical tropopause, CWVCS, which was flown from Costa Rica in August, 2001. We flew a suite of instruments aboard the NASA WB-57F aircraft, with the goal of substantially expanding our understanding of the transport of water vapor and other gases from the troposphere into the stratosphere. The payload included a new Harvard Total Water instrument, INTESA, and a medium resolution FTS capable of looking up, down, sideways and at the sun, with a spectral range of 200 to 13000 cm-1.
I'm interested in the challenge of monitoring climate change from space. I'm working on understanding the sampling errors in brightness temperatures obtained by a hypothetical satellite in various possible orbits. How many satellites in which orbits would we need to observe a pattern of 0.1 K changes in mean brightness temperature?
My dissertation (I got my Ph.D. in Meteorology from the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at MIT in 1997). described an energy balance climate model that uses an assumption of potential vorticity homogenization on isentropes, together with a radiative transfer model, to determine the atmosphere's temperature structure. I've since used this model to investigate the interrelationship of the stratospheric overturning circulation, polar stratospheric clouds and polar climate, with an eye to explaining the polar warmth of the Eocene epoch (and other warm times).
Anderson, J.G., R.M. Goody, Y.L. Yung, X. Huang, J.A. Dykema, D.B. Kirk-Davidoff, 2002: Absolute Spectrally Resolved Radiance: A Benchmark for Climate Monitoring. Submitted to J. Climate. PDF.
Kirk-Davidoff, D.B., D.P. Schrag, and J.G. Anderson, 2002: On the Feedback of Stratospheric Clouds on Polar Climate. Geophys. Res. Let.. 29(11), 10.1029/2002GL014659. PDF.
Weinstock, E.M., E.J. Hintsa, D.B. Kirk-Davidoff, J.G. Anderson, A.E. Andrews, R.L. Herman, R.D. May, C.R. Webster, and T.P. Bui, 2001: Evaluation of the seasonal cycle of water vapor in the stratosphere derived from tropical tropopause temperatures using a CO photochemical clock. J. Geophys. Res. 106:22,707-22,724. PDF.
Kirk-Davidoff, D.B., and R.S. Lindzen, 2000: An Energy Balance Model Based on Potential Vorticity Homogenization. Journal of Climate. 13:431-448. Postscript or PDF.
Kirk-Davidoff, D.B., J.G. Anderson, E.J. Hintsa, and D.W. Keith, 1999: The effect of climate change on ozone depletion through changes in stratospheric water vapour. Nature. 402:399-401. Postscript or PDF.
Lindzen, R.S., B. Kirtman, D. Kirk-Davidoff, and E.K. Schneider, 1995: Seasonal Surrogate for Climate. Journal of Climate. 8:1681-1684.
Personal Stuff