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H2020Individual fellowship2018–2021

OceanModes · Basin modes of the ocean: their role in the interannual to interdecadal climate variability

Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2018-01-08 → 2021-01-07
EU contribution
€264,668
Participants
2
Scheme
MSCA-IF-GF

Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.

Results in brief

Basin modes of the ocean: their role in the interannual to interdecadal climate variability

Understanding the effect of global warming on the ocean remains a central objective for the future of humanity. However the difficulty is that the anthropogenic climate warming signal in the ocean-atmosphere system is superposed with a rich diversity of natural signals, the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation found for scales in excess of 500 km and 10 year period and the very energetic oceanic mesoscale turbulence found at much smaller scales, 100-500 km and monthly periods. As a prerequisite to separate the global warming signal from the natural signals, the central objective of OceanModes is to understand the causes of the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation and find how the oscillation interacts with the mesoscale turbulence. In short is the mesoscale turbulence a source or a sink for the long period oscillation?

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

Decadal climate predictions are a strong societal need for both EU and non-EU communities. However, mechanisms of low-frequency variability of the climate system remain unclear, preventing accurate prediction of decadal climate changes. Several mechanisms have been proposed so far and they can be sorted in three categories: ocean only, atmospheric only and coupled dynamics. My project falls in the first category, focussing on the intrinsic variability of the ocean forced by prescribed steady (or seasonally varying) atmospheric forcing. Because of the long memory of the ocean, recurrent patterns of oceanic variability, such as the oscillatory free basin modes, are the best candidates for decadal predictions of the ocean-atmosphere system. However, our current understanding of the dynamics behind basin modes is low and urgent action is needed to improve it. An important question is whether these patterns can emerge above the noise level of stochastic variability. One of my scientific hypotheses is that local baroclinic instability at high latitudes, in addition to wind-stress and surface buoyancy fluctuations, can excite robust global modes of oceanic variability. Objectives of my project consist in increasing our knowledge of oceanic basin modes and assessing their relevance to decadal climate predictions. In the first part of the project, the dependence of the global modes on external parameters, such as bathymetry, model resolution, coastlines and mean flow will be systematically studied in a step-by-step approach. In the second part, I will obtain the optimal forcing of the basin modes and its dependence on the external parameters cited above. In the third part, the basin modes will be calculated in a realistic setting of the world ocean and rationalized in the light of what have been learnt in the first two parts.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • UNIVERSITE DE BREST · BRESTCoordinatorFrance
  • THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA · OaklandUnited States

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union