Ocean influence on recent climate extremes

In this project the student will use a state-of-the-art eddy-resolving global ocean simulation which covers the period from 1958 to present to study the genesis of ocean temperature and salinity anomalies. This simulation is regularly updated and will allow us to investigate any ocean anomaly that may develop during the course of the project.

The goal will be to understand whether these ocean anomalies result from advection, the meandering of major ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream or the Kuroshio, local forcing from the atmosphere or from the re-emergence of subsurface anomalies. Techniques that will be used include lagrangian tracking as well as establishing the force balances (e.g. geostrophy, wind forcing) that govern the ocean circulation anomalies which precede/coincide with the development of ocean temperature/salinity anomalies. Additionally, the student will perform idealised attribution experiments, where atmospheric conditions are either variable or kept constant (respectively climatological). In combination these three approaches will allow us to determine the respective contributions of ocean and atmospheric circulations to ocean temperature and salinity anomalies.