Reading and Reference List
Ideas for Project
S 560/Ocean 560, Spring Quarter 2001
Coupled Atmosphere -
Meeting Times and Location: Tuesday/Thursday from 1:30 to 2:45 pm in Room
310C in the Atmospheric
Phone: (206) 543-2019
Office: Room 718 in the Atmospheric Sciences
The class will be subdivided
in three parts:
The Basic Physics of the Mean Climate:
We will start by reviewing the essential elements
(physics and geometry) that are responsible for the gross features of the
mean climate state and the annual cycle in the global ocean and atmosphere.
This introduction will help to build an intuition for the processes
responsible for variability in the climate system, from seasonal to decadal
Coupled Atmosphere-Ocean Variability in the Tropics: In this part of the class,
we will focus on the dynamics of the El Nino/Southern Oscillation
phenomenon, including the possible repercussions from ENSO on
atmosphere-ocean coupling in midlatitudes. ENSO is the most important and
simplest example of natural climate variability on interannual time scales,
and has been shown to have some impact on weather outside of the tropics.
Included in the first half of the course will be a brief overview of the
dynamics of the tropical oceans and atmosphere.
Variability in the midlatitudes:
In this part of the course we will focus on climate variability due to
atmosphere and ocean interactions in the middle and high latitudes. These
higher latitude interactions are thought to result from a fundamentally
different set of dynamics than those in the tropics, and are much more
difficult to sort out in the data. We will
examine the likely scenarios of atmosphere-ocean interaction that could be
responsible for interannual-to-decadal decadal climate variability in the
midlatitudes which have been hypothesized during the last decade. Scenarios
discussed include the null hypothesis (the response of the coupled system to
stochastic dynamical forcing), the Latif/Barnett and gyre-intergyre
hypotheses and the possible causes for the observed decadal trend in the
Arctic/North Atlantic Oscillation.
See the syllabus
for a more detailed description.
The first day of class is Tuesday, March
27 2001: Course overview and introduction. See you in class!