This talk is presented as a Zoom Webinar and requires a passcode. For anyone outside the department; If you would like to attend, email [email protected]

Linking climate feedbacks to ocean heat uptake

Transient climate change is a result of a complex competition between radiative forcing agents and the cooling effect of ocean heat uptake. In many comprehensive models this competition manifests as a time-dependent increase in climate sensitivity, or a shift toward more positive climate feedbacks. This poses big challenges for estimating future sensitivity from historical observations. It turns out that regionally localized ocean heat uptake excites global radiative feedbacks that are systematically more negative than those governing the long-term equilibrium. A lot of progress has been made recently in unraveling the mechanisms by which, for example, variations in heat uptake by the Southern Ocean modulate the subtropical low cloud cover. I will discuss several recent lines of work on these problems (all involving some creative use of climate models) and try to convince you that an importantly large fraction of the uncertainty in cloud feedbacks actually originate from uncertainty in ocean mixing. 

Zoom Webinar: https://psu.zoom.us/j/93506582787?pwd=WXFGa1JmREhxcUlMRlROV0dQcDN2Zz09