This week Leah Birch will be leading discussion on Lenaerts et al. 2013: "Irreversible mass loss of Canadian Arctic Archipelago glaciers". Leah says the following about the paper:
"The ice volume in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago is the third largest in the world, and in the past decade that area has been warm and dry, very unfavorable for glaciers. The authors model the present day climate in this area using a regional climate model and confirm it matches observations. They then use this model to predict future melt in this region, finding less...
Sea ice is a thin, dynamic interface between the atmosphere and ocean. We review the role of sea ice in the climate system, and discuss how we model sea ice in large-scale climate models. The growth of sea ice is a largely one-dimensional, thermodynamic process that involves the transport...
Abstract: The ocean is the primary reservoir of thermal energy in the earth system. As greenhouse gasses affect the planetary energy balance, key ways to track and predict energy variability are ocean observations and modeling. However, to go...
"The remote impacts of climate feedbacks on regional climate predictability"
This week Cristi Proistosescu will be leading discussion on Roe et al. 2015 (papers attached): The remote impacts of climate feedbacks on regional climate predictability. Cristi says the following about the paper:
"In this paper the author use a a moist energy balance model in conjunction with locally defined feedbacks to asses the relationship between uncertainties in feedback patterns and uncertainties in temperature response patterns. They find that uncertainties in...
This Thursday we will continue in the vein of the AMOC. The abstract for the talk is below:
Feedback between the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) multidecadal variability and atmospheric circulation is investigated in a 1300 year-long pre-industrial control simulation of the Community Climate System Model version 4 (CCSM4) primarily using the lagged maximum covariance analysis (MCA). The feedback is strongest in winter....
This week GS Chris Horvat will be leading discussion on Rahmstorf et al (2015), 'Exceptional twentieth-century slowdown in Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation.' Chris says the following about the the upcoming ClimaTea:
This week we will continue our discussion of climate instability, centered around the recent Nature article by Rahmstorf et. al, "exceptional twentieth-century slowdown in Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation". The authors attribute a region of "conspicuous" cooling relative to the background warming signal in the northern...
The ocean plays a key role in the industrial-era climate system: it has taken up nearly a third of the anthropogenic carbon and over 90% of the energy trapped by elevated greenhouse gas concentrations. The ocean circulation sequesters heat and carbon to depth and thereby regulates the exchange with the atmosphere at the sea surface. It has recently been recognized that...
This week Tim Cronin will be leading discussion on Wagner and Eisenman (2015), 'How Climate Model Complexity Influences Sea Ice Stability'. Tim says the following about the paper (attached):
"The small ice cap instability, or potential for rapid and irreversible loss of sea ice once it retreats to high enough latitudes, has been found in numerous simple models of the climate system, and presents a significant concern for abrupt climate change in the future. But it has been difficult to find a robust small ice cap instability in full-complexity 3D atmosphere-ocean...
This week Katie Dagon will be presenting Williams et al. (2015) "Contribution of anthropogenic warming to California drought during 2012–2014." (attached) Katie says about the paper:
"The ongoing California drought is a much-discussed topic both in the news and recent scientific literature (1). Of particular interest is whether the drought has been influenced by climate change. To that end, I will lead a discussion exploring the causes of the California drought and its connection to anthropogenic climate change. The anthropogenic signature on the drought is discussed in...