This award is towards support of a two-day symposium to celebrate the contributions of George Philander. The following five key questions will be addressed at the meeting: (i) What is the relative importance of the thermohaline and wind-driven components of the oceanic circulation to the Earth's climate? (ii) Do conditions in polar regions determine conditions in the tropics, or vice versa? (iii) How can records of recurrent Ice Ages be used to develop testable hypotheses for climate models? (iv) What tests can records of recurrent Ice Age provide for climate models? (v) Why is global warming so polarizing? A key goal of the symposium is to engage a younger generation of scientists in scientific discussion that crosses disciplinary boundaries. NSF funding will cover participant travel costs including support for young scientists to attend the symposium.
, for $20,000 provided core for a multidisciplinary symposium, in particular, providing support for graduate student and junior scientist participation. The intellectual merit of this proposal consists of the five central climate research topics, still largely unresolved, and the progress possible by bringing together expertise from different fields such as climate modeling, paleoclimate experts, and experts in crowd psychology. The five topics are: (i) The relative importance of the thermohaline and wind-driven components of the oceanic circulation to the Earth's climate. The oceanic circulation has two main components linked by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current: the deep, slow thermohaline and the shallow, rapid wind-driven circulation. Which is more important to climate, the thermohaline or the wind-driven circulation? What tests can determine which models, if any, are realistic? (ii) The relative importance of the polar regions versus the tropics, in controlling the seasonal cycle. High latitudes have huge seasonal variations in sunlight and temperature; low latitudes have very modest variations in sunlight, but can have large variations in rainfall. What are the implications of these observations for the influence of polar regions on the tropics and vice versa? Are there constraints on globally averaged values? (iii) The El Niño-climate connection. The Southern Oscillation between El Niño and La Niña depends on background conditions, the time-averaged depth of the thermocline etc. Are these statements consistent with observations? Can they explain the differences between different models? What are the implications for the predictability of seasonal and interannual climate fluctuations? (iv) Paleoclimate as a test for current climate models. The climate of today is of limited value because it is but one narrow parameter range from a much wider range of possibilities that have been explored by the Earth during other eras. Progress in understanding the Earth’s climate requires more interplay between observations and a hierarchy of models, from simple to complex, than is typically taking place now. (v) The last issue lies more in the realm of psychology than climate research because it addresses the question of why the subject of global warming is so polarizing. The issue is puzzling because the vast majority of scientists believe that global warming is a serious problem, but many laypeople do not. The reasons for this divide include the wrenching resource distribution dilemmas global warming poses. The symposium associated with this grant had as a key ‘broader impact’, the bringing together of the participants, including 12 grant-supported graduate students, and creation of the symposium website: http://aos.princeton.edu/philander.
