Ocean Climate Change with Emphasis on the Southern Hemisphere

Supervisors

Nathan Bindoff (UTas), Susan Wijffels (CSIRO), John Church (CSIRO)

Project Outline

Aims

To map, understand and validate past and predicted ocean climate changes around Australia, and to explore impacts for a few key regions/industries.

The nature and impact of ocean climate changes for Australia have largely been ignored in assessments of climate change impact. Presently we have little detailed knowledge of the type of changes predicted and what processes might be operating to produce them. Also, we have done little work to validate climate change models in our region using ocean data.

Method

1. Assemble the output of several (5-10, try to include a layer model) state of the art coupled climate change and control model runs from various international centers, and produce assessments of changes in ocean structure predicted by these models for the past 50 years and the future 100 years.

2. Intercompare the changes predicted for the past 50 years and use ocean data to validate the model hindcasts

3. Intercompare the changes predicted for the next 100 years and explore the dynamical processes producing these changes.

4. Choose a few key regions and industries to assess the impacts of the predicted ocean changes, given the limitations of the models and the predictions.

Collaborations

Local and overseas coupled climate modelling groups, CSIRO DAR, CSIRO Land and Water (for impacts)

Contact

Assoc Prof Nathan Bindoff or tel +61 3 6226 2986