Hobart

Seminar Abstract

Friday 3 April 2009, 11.30am (Tas time)
CSIRO Auditorium,
Hobart

Andrew T Wittenberg
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, NOAA
Princeton, USA

Understanding & simulating El Niño: Lessons from the GFDL global coupled GCMs

The El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is Earth's dominant interannual climate signal, with major impacts on weather, ecosystems, agriculture, fisheries, and human populations around the globe. The past 25 years have seen significant progress toward understanding ENSO and simulating it in coupled general circulation models (CGCMs). Yet modelers still struggle to get reasonable ENSOs out of CGCMs designed for global multicentury projections, and some fundamental questions remain. What range of ENSO behavior should we "naturally" expect from decade to decade or century to century? What are the primary controls on ENSO's amplitude, period, and spatial structure? How does one "tune" a model's ENSO, subject to observational constraints? How might ENSO respond to future anthropogenic forcings? This talk will focus on GFDL's efforts to address these questions, drawing on our recent experience in developing several new CGCMs for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment in 2013.

[back]

Location:
CSIRO = Marine Laboratories Auditorium, Castray Esplanade, Hobart

For further information, or to schedule a seminar, contact:
To schedule a seminar, contact:
Clothilde Langlais, (Oceanographic seminars) CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research (03) 6232 5399
Natalie Kelly, (Biology/Modelling seminars) CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research 0438 452 483
Jillian Enraght-Moony, (seminar administrator) CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research (03) 6232 5320
Communications Manager, Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC (03) 6226 2265
Margaret Hazelwood, Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies (IASOS) University of Tasmania (03) 6226 2971

Last updated 21/07/09