Sophie Wacongne-Speer

Research

Air-sea interaction

graph of circulation Air-sea interaction refers to the fluxes of heat and fresh water exchanged between the atmosphere and the ocean. The project I am involved with focuses on the Southern Ocean, that fraction of the World Ocean located south of 40 degrees S around Antarctica. Current data sets built to show the climatological mean state at the surface of the Southern Ocean do indicate that the region is cold but are not precise enough to demonstrate that, as a whole, it is loosing heat to the atmosphere. In fact a large subregion appears to be gaining heat. A long-term goal is thus to quantify the surface air-sea fluxes over the Southern Ocean. Because it is the region of the World Ocean with strongest winds, most violent storms, and least traffic, we plan on using satellite data and concentrating at first on the effect of individual storms on the surface fluxes and the associated ocean response. This project involves a team from FSU (Oceanography and Meteorology) and from Boulder, Co.

Climate dynamics

Climate dynamics refers to the way the climate system as a whole, atmosphere-ocean-ice-land changes from one state to another on daily to multi-centennial scales. For instance, climate change scenarios study how the system changes when the atmospheric concentration in green-house gases changes. Surface heat and fresh water fluxes are just a link in the complex chain of reactions that occurs in each medium involved. The project I work on began four years ago with the goal of putting together a new coupled climate model based on an ocean model of a somewhat different architecture, on the premice that this model will do a better job than most current models at preserving the ocean characteristics on long-time scales, at least when all bugs are worked out. We plan on studying the dynamics of the coupled system in regions of strong air-sea interaction and on investigating its behavior under climate change scenarios. This project involves a team from FSU (Oceanography and Meteorology) and colleagues working at Los Alamos National Laboratory and NASA/GISS, New York.

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