GUEST EXPERT: Dr. Elizabeth Maroon
Dr. Elizabeth Maroon, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado
Date of Webinar: November 30, 2017 at 3PM Eastern
Topic/Title: How does the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation influence the amount of global warming?
Description: The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) transports heat, freshwater, and carbon, giving it a large influence on global climate. Variability in North Atlantic sea surface temperature on multidecadal timescales has been attributed to fluctuations in the AMOC strength. In turn, this temperature variability influences climate elsewhere, including Sahel precipitation and Atlantic hurricane activity. As such, improved understanding of the AMOC may lead to more skillful climate predictions. In the 21st century if greenhouse gas emissions continue as like today, we expect that the AMOC will weaken substantially, leading to large impacts on climate. In this webinar, we will discuss how the AMOC responds to global warming and how the AMOC also influences the amount of surface warming. We will review past work on this subject and present new work using an ensemble of climate simulations that allows the clean separation of the forced response of global warming from the internal variability.
Guest Expert Bio: Dr. Maroon is a postdoctoral fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado. Her research interests include climate variability and coupled ocean-atmosphere modeling. She finished her MS and PhD in Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington and her undergraduate degrees in Physics and Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
To view the recorded webinar, please visit https://youtu.be/odgULxG2SMg.
For further reading:
- On observing the AMOC: https://www.nature.com/news/oceans-under-surveillance-1.12949, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFUR907A4rA
- On the Gulf Stream and its influence on European winters: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-simulations-question-gulf-stream-role-tempering-europes-winters/
- On Atlantic Multidecadal Variability: https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/atlantic-multi-decadal-oscillation-amo
- For a very thorough expert’s review on the AMOC: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015RG000493/full
