January 14, 2021: Online Ocean Circulation and Climate Dynamics Colloquium

The North Atlantic ocean is key to climate through its role in heat transport and storage, but the circulation’s response to a changing climate is poorly constrained in models. Here, key features governing the strength of the circulation are assessed in a climate model: the deep water formation areas and locations of the Gulf Stream and Trans Atlantic Current transporting heat northward. With abrupt CO2 quadrupling, dynamical features shift to indicate circulation weakening. If CO2 is increased 1% yearly, similar but more transient patterns emerge. For the analysis, the Tracking global Heating with Ocean Regimes(THOR) method is developed. THOR reveals in-depth drivers of circulation, using only the depth, dynamic sea level and wind stress. THOR applies an explainable multilayer perceptron with data features engineered and labeled by an explicitly interpretable unsupervised machine learning method. THOR could accelerate climate model analysis with concrete dynamical intercomparisons, potentially helping constrain uncertainties.

When?    Thursday, 14 January 2021, 4pm
Where?   Webex Meeting Room: https://geomar.webex.com/geomar/j.php?MTID=m7f20d97cc4986beb60dd5fce9b3e28bc
Meeting number (access code): 174 367 9077
Meeting password: tbFEryDJ345

List of all OCCD Presentations in 2021