Sponsored by: Available
by Joellen Russell, University of Arizona
Abstract: Floats deployed by oceanographers are giving us all ringside seats to the epic battle between the wind and the deep ocean around Antarctica which will determine the rate of global atmospheric warming over the next century. The poleward-shift and intensification of the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds has been shown to maintain the connection between the surface ocean and the atmosphere with the deep ocean even as the surface ocean warms. This “doorway” allows the vast deep ocean reservoir to play a significant role in the transient global climate response to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases. Coupled climate and earth system models at low and high resolution all simulate poleward-shifted and intensified Southern Hemisphere surface westerly winds when subjected to an atmospheric carbon dioxide doubling. Comparisons of these simulations reveal how stratification, resolution and eddies affect the transient global climate response to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases – and our collective fate.
Bio: Prof. Joellen Russell is the Thomas R. Brown Chair for Integrative Science and an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona in the Department of Geosciences. Her research uses global coupled climate models and earth system models to simulate the climate and carbon cycle of the past, the present and the future, and develops observationally-based metrics to evaluate these simulations. Before joining the University of Arizona, Dr. Russell was a Research Scientist at Princeton University and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (NOAA/GFDL). Prior to that, Dr. Russell was a fellow at the Joint Institute for the Study of Atmsophere and Oceans at the University of Washington. Prof. Russell currently serves as a member of the NOAA Science Advisory Board’s Climate Working Group, as an Objective Leader for the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research’s Antarctic Climate21, and on the World Climate Research Program’s Southern Ocean Region Panel. She is also an Associate Editor for the American Geophysical Union’s journal, Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology. Prof. Russell is one of the 14 scientists behind an amicus curiae brief supporting the plaintiff in the historic 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision on carbon dioxide emissions and climate change, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, et al. v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And in 2011, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists appointed her a Distinguished Lecturer. She received her A.B. in Environmental Geoscience from Harvard and her PhD in Oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.
