ORCID Profile
0000-0002-1476-0452
Current Organisation
UNSW Sydney
Does something not look right? The information on this page has been harvested from data sources that may not be up to date. We continue to work with information providers to improve coverage and quality. To report an issue, use the Feedback Form.
Publisher: American Meteorological Society
Date: 03-2019
Abstract: El Niño and La Niña, the warm and cold phases of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), cause significant year-to-year disruptions in global climate, including in the atmosphere, oceans, and cryosphere. Australia is one of the countries where its climate, including droughts and flooding rains, is highly sensitive to the temporal and spatial variations of ENSO. The dramatic impacts of ENSO on the environment, society, health, and economies worldwide make the application of reliable ENSO predictions a powerful way to manage risks and resources. An improved understanding of ENSO dynamics in a changing climate has the potential to lead to more accurate and reliable ENSO predictions by facilitating improved forecast systems. This motivated an Australian national workshop on ENSO dynamics and prediction that was held in Sydney, Australia, in November 2017. This workshop followed the aftermath of the 2015/16 extreme El Niño, which exhibited different characteristics to previous extreme El Niños and whose early evolution since 2014 was challenging to predict. This essay summarizes the collective workshop perspective on recent progress and challenges in understanding ENSO dynamics and predictability and improving forecast systems. While this essay discusses key issues from an Australian perspective, many of the same issues are important for other ENSO-affected countries and for the international ENSO research community.
Publisher: American Meteorological Society
Date: 15-11-2020
Abstract: The equatorial Pacific warm water volume (WWV), defined as the volume of water warmer than 20°C near the equator, is a key predictor for El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and yet much about the in idual processes that influence it remains unknown. In this study, we conduct idealized ENSO simulations forced with symmetric El Niño– and La Niña–associated atmospheric anomalies as well as a historical 1979–2016 hindcast simulation. We use the water mass transformation framework to examine the in idual contributions of diabatic and adiabatic processes to changes in WWV. We find that in both sets of simulations, El Niño’s discharge and La Niña’s recharge periods are initiated by diabatic fluxes of volume across the 20°C isotherm associated with changes in surface forcing and vertical mixing. Changes in adiabatic horizontal volume transport above 20°C between the equator and subtropical latitudes dominate at a later stage. While surface forcing and vertical mixing deplete WWV during El Niño, surface forcing during La Niña drives a large increase partially compensated for by a decrease driven by vertical mixing. On average, the ratio of diabatic to adiabatic contributions to changes in WWV during El Niño is about 40% to 60% during La Niña this ratio changes to 75% to 25%. The increased importance of the diabatic processes during La Niña, especially the surface heat fluxes, is linked to the shoaling of the 20°C isotherm in the eastern equatorial Pacific and is a major source of asymmetry between the two ENSO phases, even in the idealized simulations where the wind forcing and adiabatic fluxes are symmetric.
Publisher: Copernicus GmbH
Date: 04-03-2021
DOI: 10.5194/EGUSPHERE-EGU21-8096
Abstract: & & Uptake and storage of heat by the ocean plays a critical role in modulating the Earth's climate system. In the last 50 years, the ocean has absorbed over 90% of the additional energy accumulating in the Earth system due to radiative imbalance. However, our knowledge about ocean heat uptake (OHU), transport and storage is strongly constrained by the sparse observational record with large uncertainties. In this study, we conduct a suite of historical 1972& #8211 hindcast simulations using a global ocean-sea ice model that are specifically designed to account for a cold start climate and model drift. The hindcast simulations are initialised from an equilibrated control simulation that uses repeat decade forcing over the period 1962-1971. This repeat decade forcing approach is a compromise between an early unobserved period (where our confidence in the forcing is low) and later periods (which would result in a shorter experiment period and a smaller fraction of the total OHU). The simulations are aimed at giving a good estimate of the trajectory of OHU in the tropics, the extratropics and in idual ocean basins in recent decades. Many modelling studies that look at recent OHU rates so far use a simpler approach for the forcing. For ex le, they use repeating cycles of 1950-2010 Coordinated Ocean Reference Experiment (CORE) forcing that is consistent with the Ocean Model Intercomparison Project 2 (OMIP-2). However, this approach cannot account for model drift. The new simulations here highlight the dominant role of the extratropics, and in particular the Southern Ocean in OHU. In contrast, little heat is absorbed in the tropics and simulations forced with only tropical trends in atmospheric forcing show only weak global ocean heat content trends. Almost 50% of the heat taken up from the atmosphere in the Southern Ocean is transported into the Atlantic Ocean. Two-thirds of this Southern Ocean-sourced heat is then subsequently lost to the atmosphere in the North Atlantic but nevertheless this basin gains heat overall. Our results help to estimate the large-scale cycling of anthropogenic heat within the ocean today and have implications for heat content trends under a changing climate.& &
Publisher: American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Date: 02-05-2020
DOI: 10.1029/2019GL086132
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 07-09-2022
DOI: 10.1038/S41467-022-32540-5
Abstract: Since the 1970s, the ocean has absorbed almost all of the additional energy in the Earth system due to greenhouse warming. However, sparse observations limit our knowledge of where ocean heat uptake (OHU) has occurred and where this heat is stored today. Here, we equilibrate a reanalysis-forced ocean-sea ice model, using a spin-up that improves on earlier approaches, to investigate recent OHU trends basin-by-basin and associated separately with surface wind trends, thermodynamic properties (temperature, humidity and radiation) or both. Wind and thermodynamic changes each explain ~ 50% of global OHU, while Southern Ocean forcing trends can account for almost all of the global OHU. This OHU is enabled by cool sea surface temperatures and sensible heat gain when atmospheric thermodynamic properties are held fixed, while downward longwave radiation dominates when winds are fixed. These results address long-standing limitations in multidecadal ocean-sea ice model simulations to reconcile estimates of OHU, transport and storage.
Location: Switzerland
Location: Switzerland
No related grants have been discovered for Maurice F. Huguenin.