2025 Sun-Earth Symposium

Exploring the Sun's Role in a Changing Cryosphere

September 15-19, 2025

Fairbanks, Alaska

Please mark your calendar today to join us in September 2025 for the 2025 Sun-Earth Symposium! Our focus topic for this 4-day symposium is “Exploring the Sun’s Role in a Changing Cryosphere”

We encourage your participation and hope that you will send in an abstract and share this announcement with your colleagues. Invited speakers will be posted to the website as they accept. Join us for a great meeting in a beautiful location!

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

DUE JAN 31st, 2025

CLOSED

AGENDA

as of 10-22-2024

Session 1. Solar Variability and Earth-Environmental Influences

The Sun’s main influence on the Earth’s enviromental systems is via solar irradiance. Variations in solar irradiance have been measured from space for 46 years and found to be predominantly due to solar-surface magnetic-flux emergence and decay. Models link solar irradiance variability to historical solar records, enabling irradiance reconstructions over the past thousands of years. This session will discuss solar-variability measurements and models over all timescales and their corresponding influences on Earth’s environmental systems, such as temperature variations and atmospheric and ocean circulation changes.

Session 2. Dynamics of Polar Environment: Variability, Feedback, and Solar Influence

The polar regions are key indicators of global climate change, and understanding their climatic variability is crucial for predicting future climate scenarios. This session explores how changes in snow and ice cover, and terrestrial and oceanic processes coupled with the atmosphere, interact and contribute to the overall variability of the polar climate. For example, we want to investigate the importance of impurities and melt dynamics for the solar spectral absorption in snow and ice and its effects on albedo, which influences the energy balance and feedback mechanisms in polar regions. This session will bring together experts from solar radiation, cryospheric, atmospheric and oceanic sciences to identify critical knowledge gaps that need to be addressed to improve our understanding of polar climate dynamics.

Session 3. Polar Region Measurements: field and satellite observations

Session 4. Paleoclimate Studies (centuries to millennia)

Diverse paleoclimate data records, such as ice core samples and tree rings, can highlight natural climate variability and the drivers of environmental variability over extended timescales. These records can reveal how solar activity, volcanic activity, and other environmental drivers have influenced global and regional environmental patterns over centuries to millennia. Results from paleoclimate studies are important for placing current environmental variability in a broader historical context and refining future environmental projections.

Session 5. Future Observations and Modeling for Advancing Environmental Science

This session will focus on new developments in observational remote-sensing techniques and climate modeling that are essential for advancing our understanding of Earth’s climate system that includes improved understanding of solar variability and cryosphere / polar climate changes. Improvements in both observational data and model simulations (e.g., spatial resolution, spectral content, radiometric calibration, and observation cadence and coverage) are critical for more accurate characterizations, attributions, and predictions. We will explore the role of new satellite missions and ground-based observations for monitoring climate variables and assess the integration of these new data sources into environmental and Earth-system models.

Science Organizing Committee

Tom Woods, SOC Chair, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

Uma Bhatt, University of Alaska at Fairbanks

Pascal Buri, University of Alaska at Fairbanks

Odele Coddington, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

Greg Kopp, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

Jae Lee, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Peter Pilewskie, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

Doug Rabin, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Erik Richard, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

Ed Thiemann, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

Dong Wu, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Please save the date and plan to join us!