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The Ocean and Climate Change
Carl Wunsch, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
January 12, 2007
Abstract
The ocean is a major component of the climate system and affects climate in many disparate ways—as a storage medium of heat, freshwater, carbon and many other substances, as a global transporter of these properties, a generator of photosynthetic oxygen, a mechanism for cycling sea ice, and other components. Perhaps the most immediate and obvious effects are through changes in sea level. Understanding of this system is somewhat primitive because, historically, it has been so difficult to measure, but new technologies have qualitatively changed the situation in the last 15 years. Another major issue is the long (compared to human careers and lifetimes) time scales of change. One is thus led to the study of past climates as recorded in ice and deep-sea cores. I will review these components of understanding the role of the ocean in climate, including suggestions that the ocean can make a major change in the system on time scales under a decade.
Biography
Carl Wunsch is Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a bachelors degree in mathematics and a PhD in geophysics, both from MIT. He has worked on many aspects of physical oceanography, including internal waves, mixing, tides, mesoscale eddies, and the general circulation of the ocean. A particular interest has been the use of new observational methods, including satellite altimetry and acoustic tomography as well as mathematical techniques for using oceanographic data, including inverse and data assimilation (state estimation) methods. He was an organizer of the recent World Ocean Circulation Experiment and has been deeply involved in the analysis of the results including the use of general circulation models. A more recent interest is in the low frequency oceanic variability with its inevitable need to understand the paleoclimate record. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a foreign member of the Royal Society of London, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society and has received a number of awards.