Studies in Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Interaction

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed work aims to understand climate phenomena that arise by interactions between the ocean, land surface and atmosphere. Methods developed by the PI and his group under previous NSF support will be applied to four related areas: (i) Tropical teleconnections and ocean-land-atmosphere interaction. Atmospheric teleconnections by which oceans influence land regions often occur within convective zones, or shifts or modulation of convective zones. Hierarchical modeling methods will be applied to analyze convective, cloud-radiative and land-surface feedbacks that occur in tropical teleconnections and related phenomena in tropical land convective regions. (ii) Intermediate atmosphere-land modeling. The intermediate model developed by the group will be maintained in support of research at UCLA and other institutions. It will be used as a platform for testing some non-standard modeling approaches (iii) Stochastic convective parameterization. Conventional convective parameterizations parameterize the mean effects of small-scale convective motions but omit the variance. A method for including this is to be explored and the impacts of this on large-scale motions will be tested. (iv) Ocean atmosphere interaction. Continuation of work on ENSO aims to provide theoretical prototypes for the substantial variability that is not associated with the leading oscillatory mode. Work is also proposed on the tropical Pacific signal of global warming that has some features in common with El Nino. The work is important because it will increase our understanding of the role of ocean, land and atmosphere in the climate system.