Colloquium: James Carton
The ocean’s role in global warming, and the climate hiatus
Wednesday, September 21, 2016 · 3:30 - 4:30 PM
TITLE: The ocean’s role in global warming, and the climate hiatus
ABSTRACT: I serve as Department Chair of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science (AOSC) and in the first part of the talk I will describe AOSC and related earth science activities at UMCP.
ABSTRACT: I serve as Department Chair of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science (AOSC) and in the first part of the talk I will describe AOSC and related earth science activities at UMCP.
In
the second part of the talk I will discuss a scientific problem that has
been engaging my research group for a number of years, which is the
role that the global oceans play in storing, transporting, and releasing
excess heat. The historical network of ocean observations changes in
time, is sparse, and is inhomogeneously distributed. These limitations
mean that we cannot estimate the changing heat content of the oceans
based solely on historical observations. Instead, we must use ocean
observations to constrain numerical simulations of ocean circulation
driven by historical estimates of surface heat, freshwater, and momentum
fluxes (a process known as data assimilation). Previous studies have
left a somewhat confused picture of the time history of the ocean’s
ability to store and transport the <1Wm-2 excess heat being added to
the ocean due to anthropogenic greenhouse gasses. How much is being
stored? How/where is it getting into the ocean? How does storage
relate to natural variability such as El Nino? Was the hiatus something
unusual? Here I describe our latest version, just about to be released,
of the Simple Ocean Data Assimilation reanalysis (SODA version 3) and
present some early results addressing these issues.