Venus is a scientifically rich target for exploration.The evolution of Venus is, at present, poorly known, despite it being our closest planetary neighbor. This book reviews current knowledge of how Venus formed, evolved, and reached its current state. It is not clear how its tectonic and volcanic activity has varied through history, nor whether it once had a habitable phase with liquid water on its surface. Science questions addressed in the book span interior processes, surface geology, the atmosphere, climate, evidence for current activity, and the potential for past habitability.
This collection features research from the ISSI Workshop: Challenges in Understanding the Global Water Energy Cycle and its Changes in Response to Greenhouse Gas Emissions, held from 26-30 September 2022. Radiative processes are key to the climate’s water-energy cycle: Climate is determined by the imbalances of solar radiative heating and long-wave radiative cooling. The circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, the environment on land, and the biosphere are all driven by local radiative imbalances. Changes in climate can be caused by alterations of the radiation budget at the top of the atmosphere or at the surface, such as those induced by changing amounts of greenhouse gases or aerosols in the atmosphere or by changing land surface properties. The sensitivity of the climate response to changes in the radiative forcing is determined by many feedback processes that alter the radiation budget, especially the processes involved with clouds and water vapor.
This collection presents results from the ISSI Workshop "Surface Bounded Exospheres and Interactions in the Solar System" which reviewed the knowledge on the surface-bounded exosphere conditions, generation, variability and loss processes, from theoretical, observational and experimental points of view. The output collects the present state of knowledge on this subject and drafts a roadmap for future investigations in view of the next missions, i.e., BepiColombo to Mercury or orbiters and landers to be operated on the Moon.
This work got its start by trying to answer the question "how do you evaluate the scientific performance of the ESA's Science Programme missions?" For many years, the decision makers responsible for the content of the ESA Science Programme have been provided with information for each mission including, but not limited to, the number of publications published, the number of publications that are highly cited, the total number of citations used, various statistical metrics and the number of unique author names. However, this reporting only provides snapshots of these missions and was not widely distributed.
This collection presents results from the ISSI Workshop "Solar and Stellar Dynamos: a New Era", held 13–17 June 2022, which aimed to take stock of the considerable progress in our understanding of many aspects of solar and stellar dynamos that has been made during the last decade. This became possible thanks to a wealth of observations from the ground and from space, the study of simplified models, and a new generation of comprehensive 3D MHD simulations.
Potential climate tipping points pose a growing risk for societies, and policy is calling for improved anticipation of them. Satellite remote sensing can play a unique role in identifying and anticipating tipping phenomena across scales. Where satellite records are too short for temporal early warning of tipping points, complementary spatial indicators can leverage the exceptional spatial-temporal coverage of remotely sensed data to detect changing resilience of vulnerable systems. Combining Earth observation with Earth system models can improve process-based understanding of tipping points, their interactions, and potential tipping cascades. Such fine-resolution sensing can support climate tipping point risk management across scales.
