On Thursday, April 8, 2021, Gerald A Meehl (NCAR) presented a seminar, Mutually interactive decadal-timescale processes connecting the tropical Atlantic and Pacific.
An international team of authors led by NCAR scientist and CLEX PI Jerry Meehl, along with CLEX CIs and AIs, propose that the Pacific and Atlantic ocean basins are mutually interactive, with each basin influencing and responding to processes in the other basin.
It has been remarkable how much we have achieved in this extraordinarily difficult year. Research coming out of the Teleconnections and Variability program over the past four months has strongly focused on how influences in one part of the world can have direct impacts on another.
Using atmospheric model experiments, researchers have shown that the warming of the tropical Indian Ocean relative to the other two tropical ocean basins can effectively control Walker Circulation changes in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and influence climate far beyond the Indian Ocean region.
As a La Niña event intensifies in the Pacific, bringing increased rain to parts of Australia and a powerful hurricane season to the Tropical Atlantic, a new book reveals the dynamics and impacts of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the irregular cycle that switches the Pacific Ocean between these cool La Niña and warm El Niño events.
Northwest of Svalbard, north of Norway, an area known as Whalers Bay stays ice‐free in winter despite the negative air temperatures. It has been assumed that this open water is maintained by inflow of warm Atlantic Water along Svalbard’s west coast; however, this mechanism has never been demonstrated quantitatively -till now.
Possible changes in Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), sometimes referred to as the Gulf Stream System, provide a key source of uncertainty regarding future climate change. Maps of temperature trends over the twentieth century show a conspicuous region of cooling in the northern Atlantic, as well as excessive warming along the North American coast. Both combined are a ‘fingerprint’ characteristic of an AMOC slow down by about 15%, unique in the past millennium or more. A number of studies of... View Article
There is compelling evidence that under different climate states (e.g. glacial-interglacial cycles), the Atlantic Ocean has experienced significant water mass reorganisations and circulation changes. This project aims to better constrain these variations, using models able to simulate proxy variations.
Marine heatwaves are becoming longer and more frequent. A global assessment of marine heatwaves has concluded that they have “the capacity to restructure entire ecosystems and disrupt the provision of ecological goods and services in the coming decades".
This project will use output from a large ensemble of state-of-the-art climate models to examine changes to the Indian Ocean circulation and how it links to changes projected for the Pacific and Atlantic basins and surface winds.