Biography
Alex is looking at a number of different aspects of the southern hemisphere climate, both its mean state and variability. Developing an offline model (based on MOM1) which includes passive, age and CFC tracers to look at ventilation pathways and timescales for deep and bottom waters. This method allows unprecedented multi-century integrations at eddy-permitting resolutions. Currently, he is extending this work to look at intermediate waters.
As an offshoot of this he also developed a lagrangian model that has been used to investigate the dispersal ability of a species of jellyfish and to determine if their dispersals are mainly natural or anthropogenic.
More recently he has been doing model runs and analyzing the extensive model datasets of the NCAR CCSM coupled climate model. The long datasets have allowed various statistical techniques to be applied to extra-tropical southern hemisphere variability. In particular he is looking at the Southern Annular Mode(SAM) and its effect on the ocean and ice systems.
He is currently looking at possible feedbacks from the ocean and ice systems back onto the SAM.
