Our activities focus on the study of the large-scale circulation of the atmosphere and ocean and can be organized around a number of themes, including climate variability assessment and forecasts, Earth system interactions, and regional climate fluctuations including hydrological variability.
For climate variability, we are concerned with signals in the large-scale atmosphere, like the role of climate modes on timescales from subseasonal to interannual. We are interested in the boundary forcing by sea and land surface through such agents as snowcover. We apply these concepts to seasonal forecasting. We are interested in how the large-scale climate signals affect weather over specific regions, such as some areas in Asia and North America, including extreme periods, like those of drought.
For Earth system interactions, we note that the planet is interconnected dynamically through the physics of the atmosphere, ocean, and solid Earth. As a result of such a connection, changes in the angular momentum of the atmosphere due to the distribution winds and mass, the ocean, due to currents and water mass, and the solid Earth, noted as changes in the length of day and planetary orientation, are linked. We supply atmospheric data relevant to these themes to the geodetic community within the context of a formal data center, the Special Bureau for the Atmosphere of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Frames Service. Also, the mass balance in ocean and atmosphere is related to that which is observable as the overall gravity field of the Earth. We are interested in how the GRACE mission measures such mass changes and how they are related to climate processes.
We are analyzing the hydrology of North America, especially the summer climate in the Southwest with increases in rainfall in midsummer, a climate signal known as the North American monsoon. A program is underway to determine how a variety of models best describe the convergence of moisture to create the monsoon flow.
More about Atmospheric Diagnostics & Oceanography activities
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