PC23A:
The Ocean as a Mediator of Climate and Climate Change I


Session ID#: 36904

Session Description:
The ocean plays a key role in shaping Earth’s climate on timescales spanning seasons to millennia. As the largest reservoir of heat and carbon in the climate system, the ocean is critical for seasonal to decadal climate prediction, projecting climate change over the coming centuries, and making sense of the paleoclimate record. The evolution of climate over the next decade depends sensitively on the state of the ocean today and its coupling to the atmosphere. Earth’s response to greenhouse gas forcing over the 21st century hinges on how heat and carbon are taken up and stored by the ocean. And the climate of the Last Glacial Maximum is thought to have been associated with an ocean circulation that is substantially different from today’s. Understanding and accurately predicting climate at all timescales requires realistic representations of how the ocean exchanges energy, momentum, freshwater, and carbon with the other components of the climate system. This session aims to explore large-scale ocean interactions with the atmosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere in both observations and models of varying complexity. We welcome contributions from studies that examine how the ocean mediates the mean climate, climate variability, and climate change in the past, present, and future.
Primary Chair:  Elizabeth Maroon, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Boulder, CO, United States
Co-chairs:  Emily Rose Newsom, California Institute of Technology, Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, Pasadena, CA, United States and Kyle Armour, University of Washington, Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences and School of Oceanography, Seattle, WA, United States
Moderators:  Kyle Armour, University of Washington, Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences and School of Oceanography, Seattle, WA, United States, Elizabeth Maroon, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Boulder, CO, United States and Emily Rose Newsom, California Institute of Technology, Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, Pasadena, CA, United States
Student Paper Review Liaison:  Elizabeth Maroon, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Boulder, CO, United States
Index Terms:

1616 Climate variability [GLOBAL CHANGE]
1620 Climate dynamics [GLOBAL CHANGE]
1627 Coupled models of the climate system [GLOBAL CHANGE]
1635 Oceans [GLOBAL CHANGE]
Cross-Topics:
  • AI - Air-Sea Interactions
  • HE - High Latitude Environments
  • OM - Ocean Modeling
  • PL - Physical Oceanography: Mesoscale and Larger

Abstracts Submitted to this Session:

A Southern Ocean mechanism for the bipolar see-saw (315801)
Andrew F Thompson, Sophia Hines and Jess F Adkins, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States
On whether the skill of North Atlantic Ocean decadal predictions can be determined (311518)
Matthew Menary and Leon Hermanson, Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter, United Kingdom
The role of the ocean in low-frequency internal variability of global temperature and energy imbalance (323408)
Robert Jnglin Wills1, Kyle Armour2, David S Battisti1 and Dennis L Hartmann3, (1)University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States, (2)University of Washington, Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences and School of Oceanography, Seattle, WA, United States, (3)University of Washington, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Seattle, WA, United States
How Momentum Coupling affects SST Variance and Large-Scale Pacific Climate Variability in CESM (309523)
Sarah Larson1, Daniel Vimont1, Amy C Clement2 and Ben P Kirtman3, (1)University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, WI, United States, (2)University of Miami, RSMAS, Miami, FL, United States, (3)University of Miami, Miami, FL, United States
The damping of ITCZ shifts by the ocean circulation through its coupling to the trade winds (303735)
Brian Green, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States and John Marshall, MIT, Cambridge, MA, United States
Title: Air-sea coupling and predictability of North Atlantic Ocean variability (325349)
Laure Zanna, University of Oxford, Department of Physics, Oxford, United Kingdom and Christopher O'Reilly, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Skillful Multi-year Predictions of Precipitation Over Land (319109)
Stephen G Yeager, Nan A Rosenbloom, Gary Strand, Keith T Lindsay and Gokhan Danabasoglu, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, United States

See more of: Past, Present and Future Climate