ATMOSPHERE AND OCEAN DYNAMICS

While atmospheric processes are responsible for the daily changes in our weather, as one considers longer timescales, the other components of the Earth become interactive and contribute to climate changes. The sea surface forms the lower boundary condition for 71% of the atmosphere and its temperature is partly controlled by oceanic processes. The ocean interacts with the atmosphere on timescales from months to hundreds of years, and one must consider them a coupled system. This forms the primary motivation for understanding oceanic processes and modeling them accurately with ocean general circulation models. A familiar example is the El Nino - Southern Oscillation phenomenon.

The atmosphere-ocean dynamics group at UTIG currently has three members, Charles Jackson, Rob Scott, and Brian Arbic. Charles is an atmospheric scientist working on climate modeling. He is currently leading efforts to quantify sources of climate model prediction uncertainty and is initiating an inverse model study of abrupt climate change. Rob studies oceanic processes and air-sea interactions with satellite observations and numerical models. Brian is a recent hire at UTIG with experience in data analysis of decadal changes in the salinities and temperatures of the deep ocean, idealized modeling of oceanic mesoscale eddies, and global models of tides and paleotides.

The atmosphere-ocean dynamics group at UTIG has close ties with others at UT: the climate group at the Department of Geological Sciences, and oceanographic remote sensing research at the Center for Space Research, as well as the geologic climate records and ice sheet dynamics groups at UTIG. In particular, the continental ice sheets, currently confined predominantly to the Arctic and Antarctica, are generally considered slow processes that influence climate on thousands of years. However, the discharge of melt water can be very rapid and is speculated to have the potential to induce rapid climate transitions over a few decades.

Here is a growing list of our general interests:

- Abrupt Climate Change
- Uncertainties in Model Predictions of Future Climate
- Bayesian Stochastic Inversion
- Advancement of Parameterization of Eddy-Topography Effects in Ocean Circulation Models
- Quantifying the Contribution of Ocean Dynamics to SST Anomaly Formation

Opportunities for Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Fellowships in climate research at UTIG.

- Graduate Student Fellowship

- Postdoctoral Fellowship (position filled)

This page under construction. For more information, contact Charles Jackson.

Find out more about our research, including our "Climate Initiative".