Oslo joint seminar in atmospheric, ocean and climate science, Massimo Bollasina

Atmospheric and climate sciences have a stronghold in Oslo among the four institutions University of Oslo, the Meteorological Institute, CICERO and NILU. This joint seminar invites renowned international experts to contribute to an informal series of lectures, meant to create interaction with the Oslo atmospheric and climate science community on recent highlights and analysis in the field. All seminars will be held on Thursdays (Noon -1pm) and lunch (sandwiches) will be served on a “first-come-first-served”-basis.

Speaker: Massimo Bollasina (University of Edinburgh)

Title:Natural and anthropogenic aerosols and the atmospheric circulation: two key challenges in understanding regional climate change

 

Abstract: 

By inducing anomalous heating gradients in the atmosphere and at the surface via radiation changes and diabatic heating anomalies, especially in the tropics, aerosols, of both natural and anthropogenic origin, can affect the large-scale atmospheric circulation and, as a result, induce teleconnections which extend the climate impact of aerosols far from their source regions to produce anomalies at hemispheric, if not near-global, scales.

One of the key uncertainties hindering our ability to more robustly project future climate change, especially at regional scale, is our limited confidence in understanding and quantifying the atmospheric dynamical response to climate forcing. The latter, in the case of aerosols, is also poorly characterised due to compounding uncertainties in the aerosol processes themselves.

This talk will discuss various aspects of the atmospheric circulation response to regional and global aerosol forcing and associated climate impact by using multiple sets of experiments with state-of-the-art climate models with perturbed aerosol emissions. Particular focus is given to tropical-extratropical interactions and the monsoon system, and the underlying physical pathways generating regional and remote climate anomalies are discussed, including the role of existing modes of climate variability.


 

Published Aug. 28, 2018 10:47 AM - Last modified Aug. 29, 2022 11:43 AM