• The Korean Journal of Quaternary Research
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• v.33 no.1_2
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• pp.1-23
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• 2021

In response to the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases, the global mean temperature is rising rapidly. In particular, the warming of the Arctic is two to three times faster than the rest. Associated with the rapid Arctic warming, the sea ice shows decreasing trends in all seasons. The faster Arctic warming is due to ice-albedo feedback by the presence of snow and ice in polar regions, which have higher reflectivity than the ocean, the bare land, or vegetation, higher long-wave heat loss to space than lower latitudes by lower surface temperature in the Arctic than lower latitudes, different stability of atmosphere between the Arctic and lower latitudes, where low stability leads to larger heat losses to atmosphere from surface by larger latent heat fluxes than the Arctic, where high stability, especially in winter, prohibits losing heat to atmosphere, increase in clouds and water vapor in the Arctic atmosphere that subsequently act as green house gases, and finally due to the increase in sensible heat fluxes from low latitudes to the Arctic via lower troposphere. In contrast to the rapid Arctic warming, in midlatitudes, especially in eastern Asia and eastern North America, cold air outbreaks occur more frequently and last longer in recent decades. Two pathways have been suggested to link the Arctic warming to cold air outbreaks over midlatitudes. The first is through troposphere in synoptic-scales by enhancing the Siberian high via a development of Rossby wave trains initiated from the Arctic, especially the Barents-Kara Seas. The second is via stratosphere by activating planetary waves to stratosphere and beyond, that leads to warming in the Arctic stratosphere and increase in geopotential height that subsequently weakens the polar vortex and results in cold air outbreaks in midlatitudes for several months. There exists lags between the Arctic warming and cold events in midlatitudes. Thus, understanding chain reactions from the Arctic warming to midlatitude cooling could help improve a predictability of seasonal winter weather in midlatitudes. This study reviews the results on the Arctic warming and its connection to midlatitudes and examines the trends in surface temperature and the Arctic sea ice.

• Korean Journal of Optics and Photonics
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.452-460
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• 2007

Ultra-low loss ZERODUR and fused silica mirrors were manufactured and their light scattering characteristics were investigated. For this purpose, ZERODUR and fused silica substrates were super-polished by the bowl feed method. The surface roughness were 0.292 ${\AA}$ and 0.326 ${\AA}$ in rms for ZERODUR and fused silica, respectively. To obtain the high reflectivity, 22 thin film layers of $SiO_2$ and $Ta_2O_5$ were deposited by Ion Beam Sputtering. The measured light scattering of ZERODUR and fused silica mirror were 30.9 ppm and 4.6 ppm, respectively. This shows that the substrate surface roughness is not the only parameter which determines the light scattering of the mirror. In order to investigate the mechanism for additional light scattering of the ZERODUR mirror, the surface roughness of the mirror was measured by AFM and was found to be 2.3 times higher than that of the fused silica mirror. It is believed that there is some mismatch at the interface between the substrate and the first thin film layer which leads to the increased mirror surface roughness. To clarify this, the contact angle measurements were performed by SEO 300A, based on the Giriflaco-Good-Fowkes-Young method. The fused silica substrates with 0.46 ${\AA}$ in its physical surface roughness shows lower contact angle than that of the ZERODUR substrate with 0.31 ${\AA}$. This indicates that the thin film surface roughness is determined by not only its surface roughness but also the surface energy of the substrate, which depends on the chemical composition or crystalline orientation of the materials. The surface energy of each substrate was calculated from a contact angle measurement, and it shows that the higher the surface energy of the substrate, the better the surface roughness of the thin film.