The present and past climate states of the Nordic Seas – Sensitivity to forcing changes and assessment of observation systems

Supervision: Kerim H. Nisancioglu (UiB), Patrick Heimbach (UT Austin)

Project funding: European Research Council (ice2ice) - http://ice2ice.b.uib.no

Project period: January 2015 - January 2018

I work with ocean models and data assimilation techniques to study high-latitude climate.

Using the adjoint of an ocean general circulation model, I try to understand the local and remote processes that generate temperature anomalies in the Nordic Seas on different timescales and their potential contribution to decadal climate predictability. 

I furthermore use data assimilation techniques to assess observation systems for the reconstruction of modern and past ocean states. My PhD project is part of the ice2ice project, which studies Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) events, abrupt climate change events during the last glacial. I explore the capability of the globally available proxy data to constrain ocean circulation of the past, taking into account its sparsity and uncertainties. By means of Uncertainty Quantification I study which paleoclimate dynamics problems are most tractable.