Paleoclimate Dynamics Summer School; Valle d'Aosta, Italy; June 16-25, 2003

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides funds to support travel for approximately ten US lecturers and students to attend the Grand Combin Summer School from June 16-25, 2003 at the Conference Center of St. Oyen, a small village at about 1,300 meters above sea-level in the upper Gran San Bernardo valley, 25 kilometers from Aosta, Italy. The Italian-French summer school on "Fundamental Problems in Geophysical and Environmental Fluid Mechanics" is organized each year by the Istituto di Scienze dell'Atmosfera e del Clima (ISAC) - CNR (Torino) and by the Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique, Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris). The theme of the course in 2003 is "Paleoclimate: Combining Observations and Dynamics" and is directed by Dr. Alain Colin de Verdiere (Univ. de Brest, France), Prof. Daniel Schrag (Harvard Univ., USA), and Prof. Eli Tziperman (Weizmann Institute, Israel). The website for information is http://www.icg.to.infn.it/grandcombin/index.html. The objective of the conference is to bring together lecturers with expertise in both paleoclimate data and paleoclimate theories and mathematical models. The students will be exposed to the basics of methodologies used to study paleoclimate proxy records, as well as the theories that are used to explain these observations. The lecture topics will range from applications of ocean, atmosphere, and nonlinear dynamics to paleoclimatology to the basic geochemistry that controls climate on longer time scales. The scope of the instruction and discussion will include climate variability phenomena on time scales from a few years (El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) during the glacial periods) to a few thousands of years (Dansgaard/ Oeschger oscillations and Heinrich events) to glacial and interglacial timescales.