ABSTRACT

Many of the mechanisms influencing variability within Earth’s climate system remain poorly understood. Outstanding issues include: explaining unusual climate conditions of the past, understanding the evolution of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, and characterizing uncertainty in projections of key climate variables (such as sea level rise). Solving these issues is not only important for advancing scientific understanding, but it is also critical for developing sound risk-management strategies within the context of climate change. The current nexus of high-performance computation, advancements in climate modeling, and reliable observations and paleo-data enable us to confront these issues at a new level. My approach combines multi-scale climate modeling with observational analysis and model-data fusion to gain mechanistic insight into processes important for climate variability, develop improved model parameterizations, and quantify uncertainty. Here I will show an application of these techniques centering on the role of ocean mixing within the coupled climate system, which is a major source of uncertainty in current climate models. Results indicate ocean mixing may have far-reaching implications connected to tropical cyclones, ENSO variability, sea level rise, and ocean-atmosphere circulations and energy budgets, and aspects of these impacts may be inter-connected through feedbacks within the coupled system.