Collaborative Research: Quantifying the Role of the Ocean Circulation in Climate Variability

There has been significant scientific progress over the past few decades in understanding the role of the ocean in climate and climate change. However, fundamental questions still exist, such as where in the global oceans and on what timescales do ocean circulations drive variations in upper-ocean heat content and sea surface temperature, and what role do those variations play in influencing events over land, such as episodes of drought and deluge, heat and cold, and storminess?

The overarching goal of the project is to comprehensively quantify the role of variations in ocean circulation on global climate variability. This goal will be achieved through two main tasks. The first will be to diagnose the extent to which ocean circulations drive changes in sea surface temperatures using different observational data sets and ocean state estimates, and the second will be to conduct numerical modeling experiments to provide insight into the influence of those ocean-driven sea surface temperature changes on global climate variability.

Together these tasks will lead to new perspectives on the role of ocean dynamic variability in the climate system, potentially leading to enhanced predictive skill of weather and climate events of direct relevance to human well-being and safety.

The broader impacts of this proposal will result from its support and training of graduate students, which is required to sustain the pool of human resources needed for excellence in global atmospheric dynamics and climate research. Graduate students from communities underrepresented in climate science will be prioritized for support, and undergraduate students from historically underrepresented groups will be entrained by leveraging existing programs that provide research opportunities to those students.

Moreover, all observational and model data generated by the project will be easily and freely accessible to the broader research community, and all results will be disseminated through publications in leading, peer-review scientific journals and through presentations of research results at prominent national and international climate workshops and conferences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.