INTERACT
Ocean-atmosphere-ice sheet interactions in the polar north, 50-150 ka BP: Implications for climate system processes
Main content
MAIN OBJECTIVES: INTERACT (Ocean-atmosphere-ice sheet interactions in the polar north, 50-150 ka BP: Implications for climate system processes). Understanding how Earth's climate responds to present and past changes in climate forcing is hampered by the complexity of the global climate system, involving nonlinearity, teleconnections and feedback mechanisms. This makes it difficult to disentangle the drive and response relationships between climate system variables. Knowledge of how climate system processes interact with each other and how this interaction is affected by external forcing is essential in order to understand the causes for abrupt climate change, and how effects from forcing of for example greenhouse gases and orbital variability propagate through the climate system. The INTERACT project seeks to elucidate such interactions between the oceans, the atmosphere and ice sheets occurring in the North Atlantic region and their relation with global climate over a 100 ka time interval that covers both glacial and interglacial climate states. We will achieve this by linking new and previously published high resolution climate proxy records from the Nordic Seas/North Atlantic region that records variability in atmospheric, oceanic and ice sheets, with key global climate parameters such as CO2, orbital variability, sea-level, low latitude hydrology and Southern Hemisphere climate/bipolar see-saw. The drive and response relationships between the climatic factors and processes will be addressed by a novel data analytical technique, Information Transfer (IT) analysis, which is especially developed for non-parametric drive and response attribution in chaotic non-linear systems.
FUNDING: Research Council of Norway, Meltzerfondet
PROJECT PERIOD: 2012-2016
PROJECT COORDINATOR: Jo Brendryen (UiB)
PROJECT PARTNERS: UiB, Stockholm University, Swansea University, University of St. Andrews, Aberystwyth University, University of Minnesota.
PEOPLE INVOLVED AT UIB: Jo Brendryen, Bjarte Hannisdal, Haflidi Haflidason, Hans Petter Sejrup