GCOE seminar “Role of Ocean in Global Warming”

3/28 (Wed) GCOE seminar (Professor Emeritus, Shukuro Manabe :Prinston University)

Date: Mar. 28, 2012 (Wed) 17:00-18:00 (We will hold the after party)
Venue: D201, Environmental Earth Science
Presenter: Professor Emeritus, Shukuro Manabe (Prinston University)
Title: “Role of Ocean in Global Warming”

Abstract:
Based upon the studies conducted around 1990 with a coupled ocean-atmosphere model, this presentation explores the role of ocean in global warming. It shows that ocean reduces and delays global warming in those regions of ocean, where water mixes deeply through convection and mixing. For example, the warming is delayed greatly and is small over very extensive regions in the Circumpolar Ocean of the Southern Hemisphere and in the northern North Atlantic Ocean, where heat is mixed very deeply. In contrast, the magnitude of warming is large and sea ice decreases rapidly over the Arctic Ocean, where halocline prevents the deep mixing. Although the study was conducted more than two decades ago, it is very encouraging that the large-scale distributions of predicted changes have begun to be confirmed by observation. Finally, I discuss briefly the influence of global warming on the uptake of carbon dioxide by the southern ocean, using a coupled model that explicitly incorporates the exchange of carbon between ocean and atmosphere.