PUTTING AN OSCILLOSCOPE TO THE CLIMATE SYSTEM: MODELLING PACIFIC DECADAL VARIABILITY USING CONTROL THEORY

While the Earth as a whole has warmed, the East Pacific Ocean has been cooling for the last couple of decades. This has had large global consequences, such as a drying of the US West and an increase in Atlantic Hurricane activity. Our best tools for understanding and forecasting climate change—numerical climate models—have failed to predict this, and we currently do not understand why. Progress on this problem has been hampered by a lack of theoretical models for what controls decadal variations in the Pacific Ocean. The project proposes to build such a theoretical framework which will allow us to investigate—and ultimately improve—how numerical models simulate climate change in the Pacific Ocean.