Houghton Lectures

Understanding of water, a deceptively simple molecule with an unusual appetite for infrared radiation, provides the foundation for much of what we know about climate, and climate change. Understanding water helps explain basic properties of the climate system, like the globally averaged surface temperature and the strength and patterns of the hydrological cycle, and rationalizes how these might change. Likewise, a lack of understanding of water, particularly controls on the distribution of its condensed phases and their coupling to circulations, is responsible for most of the uncertainty about the future trajectory of the climate system. All of which makes better understanding atmospheric water climate science's foremost intellectual challenge.