Modelling the Global Ocean Circulation

The oceans have absorbed >90% of the heat energy and ~40% of the carbon dioxide added to Earth’s climate system over the industrial era. This heat and carbon is pulled around by the ocean circulation, which can act to push water from the surface to the deep ocean and back, or from Equator to poles...

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3 Jun 2021 | 4:30pm
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Prof Andy Hogg
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Description

The oceans have absorbed >90% of the heat energy and ~40% of the carbon dioxide added to Earth’s climate system over the industrial era. This heat and carbon is pulled around by the ocean circulation, which can act to push water from the surface to the deep ocean and back, or from Equator to poles. Ocean circulation occurs on planetary scales, but also depends on fluid processes that can be as small as millimetres.

In this talk I will show how we use our knowledge of fluid mechanics to formulate global ocean and sea ice models which can be used to investigate the behaviour of ocean circulation and predict future climate states. The advent of high-performance computing has allowed us to simulate the ocean with ever-increasing resolution, revealing new dynamics into how turbulence and mixing alter the ocean circulation and Earth’s climate.

About the speaker

Professor Andy Hogg completed his undergraduate degree in physics at the Australian National University in 1996 and was awarded his PhD in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics from the University of Western Australia in 2002. He then spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Southampton Oceanography Centre, where he developed a new, high-resolution coupled ocean-atmosphere model. In 2004 he returned to ANU to take up a position as an ARC postdoctoral fellow. He is currently based at ANU’s Research School of Earth Sciences.

Prof Hogg’s research interests centre on physical processes governing the ocean and climate. His work within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes is focused on understanding ocean-atmosphere interactions in the Southern Ocean and particularly the exchange of heat, momentum and carbon between different components of the climate system. He will play a key role in developing tools to understand the climate system at progressively finer scales.

Due to Prof Hogg’s unique contributions to understanding of the Southern Ocean, he was awarded the Frederick White Prize from the Australian Academy of Science in 2012, the Nicholas P. Fofonoff Award from the American Meteorological Society and the AMOS Priestly Award in 2015.

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