Alyssa has a joint with our Climate Modeling and Predictability group + the NC State Climate Office. She'll be working at the interface of climate dynamics and climate impacts in the Carolinas!
Bob is diving into an important climate dynamics problem: how will ENSO impacts change in a future climate? We're excited to see you both! |
Kay is joining the University of Alaska Fairbanks as an assistant professor of physical oceanography. Make sure to follow his journey at his new faculty page HERE. We're sad to see him go but could not be more excited for him!
Prospective students: Kay will be looking for new graduate students to join his group. Check out his exciting work HERE and contact him if you're interested. |
Science Editor's Highlight: "Global warming blown up"
NOAA Climate Program Office: "How can changes in wind-driven ocean circulation affect global warming?" NCSU: "Wind, Water, and Warming" Find the full (open access) paper HERE |
Sam Michlowitz did an awesome job defending her thesis titled "The Role of the Ocean Circulation on Externally Forced Trends in the Tropical North Atlantic." She looked at how changes in the ocean circulation can impact environmental conditions for hurricanes.
She begins her full time position at the NWS Louisville in May. Congratulations, Sam! |
Kaitlin will be interning at the NC Department of Transportation during summer 2023 to better understand how climate change will impact their operations and needs.
Dr. Kathie Dello from the NC State Climate Office is also on Kaitlin's leadership team and is a co-advisor on her thesis. Congrats Kaitlin! See info about the KIETS program and application information HERE |
Sarah and coauthors find that Aleutian low/PNA events forced by ENSO leave different North Pacific SST and North American precipitation fingerprints than Aleutian low/PNA events unrelated ENSO. During a deeper Aleutian low, as part of the Pacific North American (PNA) pattern, the southern and eastern US predominantly experiences dry anomalies (left panel). However, if El Nino contributes to the forcing of the deeper Aleutian low, the tropical forcing modifies the pattern through the addition of a wet anomaly (right panel), thus significantly weakening the dry anomaly pattern or reversing the anomaly sign altogether in parts of the southeast. See the full paper here.
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Congratulations to Sam as she continues to study how the changing ocean circulation may impact conditions under which tropical cyclones will form in a future climate. See her profile for the fellowship here. She joins a group of interdisciplinary students from NC State tackling important climate change problems.
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March 2022:
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Kay finds that Indian Ocean Dipole events (see example to the left) that are not forced by ENSO leave practically no imprint on the meridional ocean heat transport in the Indian Ocean. This is at odds with studies claiming a strong link between the IOD and Indian Ocean heat transport. Instead, he finds that this IOD-heat transport relationship is almost entirely due to remote forcing from the Pacific, or ENSO, being a common forcing for both. Read the full paper here. |
Sam joins us from Mobile, AL where she got her B.S. in Meteorology at the University of South Alabama.
Here's a note from Sam: "My research interests are in air-sea interaction and application to forecasting. After graduate school, I am looking into becoming a SOO in the National Weather Service to help blend my love for forecasting and research application. Outside of school, I really enjoy working out, cooking, and being outdoors." |
Kay joins us from the University of Miami, where he got his PhD in physical oceanography. He will be running and analyzing our new CESM2 model experiments that are in the works! Kay's background in ocean circulation and heat transports in the real world will be important in helping us understand how the ocean responds to changes in radiative heat fluxes and surface winds in a future climate.
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Thanks to NOAA and climate.gov for featuring our group and my early career journey! Check out the full story HERE
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The above figure shows that when wind effects are included in the forcing of the AMOC, meridional coherence of the overturning is confined to the NH.
To read the full paper, go HERE. |
We test whether the attributes typically ascribed to the large-scale, buoyancy-driven AMOC emerge in a climate model that is only coupled through buoyancy (heat + freshwater fluxes). Overall, the buoyancy-driven AMOC:
We then test whether these attributes can be extracted from a fully coupled model. Some can and some cannot - see paper for details! |
In collaboration with Kathy Pegion at GMU (a seasonal-to-subseasonal prediction expert), we ask the question: Do asymmetries in ENSO predictability arise from different recharged states? We dig into initialized seasonal climate predictions from the North American Multimodel Ensemble (NMME) prediction system to see if subsurface ocean anomalies make El Nino or La Nina more predictable. Our conclusion: Neither. In a realistic forecast setting, we see no evidence that El Nino events are more predictable than La Nina events, or vice versa, even when the system is "primed" for an event.
Figure caption: Ensemble mean and spread (vertical dashed lines) of January initialized ENSO forecasts for all years and all ensemble members that first predict a recharge (red) versus a discharge (blue). Since the signal to noise ratio is similar (signal/spread), their predictability are comparable. |
A group of international ENSO researchers convene in Guayaquil to talk the state of the science and learn how ENSO events impact Ecuadorians.
Left pic: Christian Martinez Villalobos, Sarah Larson, Dan Vimont Right: Sarah Larson delivering a talk on the role of the subsurface ocean in ENSO predictability |