Research Summaries

Back A Feasibility Study for Understanding Climate Uncertainty with an Ocean Focus

Fiscal Year 2009
Division Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department Oceanography
Investigator(s) Tokmakian, Robin T.
Sponsor National Science Foundation (NSF)
Summary The focus of the research addresses the topic: "Using an ocean component of a state-of-the-art global climate model to specifically address and shed insights on uncertainties in current climate change projections." Complex climate models, or AOGCMs, make use of parameters to represent aspects of various processes. This effort would explore the parameter space of the ocean component of the climate model with a focus on understanding the uncertainties associated with a set of climate related ocean metrics (e.g. transports, MOC strength, sea level, regional and global SST). We proposed to 1) run a designed experiments, using the ocean/ice components of an AOGCM's parameter space, of 100 years for a full ensemble of 100. 2) Use the model output to develop an emulator to explore uncertainties and sensitivities of a model's parameter space. 3) Create and use an ensemble of 10 runs of the same model at a higher resolution and through mapping differences between the low and high resolutions make inferences about uncertainty of the higher resolution model. This work is applicable to Naval interests in the predication capabilities of ocean models.
Keywords Ocean Modeling Uncertainty Prediction
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal