Instructor: Professor
David S. Battisti
718 Atmospheric Sciences Bldg., 543-2019
Office
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General Description:
In this course we will examine the interactions between the oceans and atmosphere which give rise to large-scale climate variability on time scales of months to years. Approximately half of the course will revolve around 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.
In the second half 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. In this portion of the course, 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 postulate during the last decade. Scenarios discussed include the null hypothesis (the response of the coupled system to stochastic dynamical forcing) and the likelyhood of exotics (e.g., the Latif/Barnett mechanism).
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