Group
Members
"The present is the key to the past"
Uniformitarianism; James Hutton
..can the past also be the key to the future?
Fergus Howell (Ph.D. Student)
Ocean Circulation in a Warmer World
My project is entitled ‘Ocean Circulation in a Warmer World’. The ‘Warmer World’ is that of the Pliocene, more specifically the mid-Pliocene Warm Period (mPWP), which spanned the period from approximately 3.3 to 3 million years before present. This period has been described as a potential analogue for future climates by the IPCC – atmospheric CO2 concentrations are estimated to have been around 400ppm (compared to 392ppm in 2011), and global annual mean temperatures are estimated to have been 2 to 3°C higher than present day, warming that is within the range predicted in the 2007 IPCC report for global temperatures at the end of the 21st century.
In this project I will be using the HadCM3 atmosphere-ocean general circulation model. In previous simulations for sea surface temperatures (SST) for the mPWP, HadCM3 has had mixed success in reproducing results to match those from the PRISM3D proxy dataset from the USGS. In many regions, particularly at low latitudes, results from model simulations are in close agreement with the proxy data estimates, but there are some very noticeable differences between the model and the proxy data, most obviously in the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, where HadCM3 produces significantly lower estimates than PRISM3D.
The aim of this project is to produce an output from the HadCM3 model that reproduces Arctic and North Atlantic warming, by running the model with various alterations to the bathymetric and orographic settings. These will include:
· Closing the Bering Strait
· Closing the Canadian Archipelago near Labrador
· Closing the Strait of Gibraltar
· Lowering the Greenland-Iceland-Scotland ridge
· Reducing the elevation of the Western Cordillera in North America
Background
I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Durham, where I did a four-year Masters in Mathematics (MMath). After graduating in 2010 I decided I wanted a change of direction and to study something less abstract than pure mathematics, so I applied for this project, and was lucky enough to get offered it!
email: eefwh@leeds.ac.uk
web: http://homepages.see.leeds.ac.uk/~eefwh/
