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Tuesday, September 28, 2021. 6:00 PM Eastern. Webinar: Drivers of Atmospheric and Oceanic Surface Temperature Variance and the Coastal Ocean and Environment Summer School in Ghana. Paige Martin, Australian National University. Sponsored by the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Access through YouTube or the GCD Seminar Page.

Ocean–atmosphere coupling modifies the variability of Earth’s climate over a wide range of time scales. However, attribution of the processes that generate this variability remains an outstanding problem. In this talk, I will present recent published work on air-sea coupling in an eddy resolving, medium-complexity, idealized ocean–atmosphere model. The model is run in three configurations: fully coupled, partially coupled (where the effect of the ocean geostrophic velocity on the sea surface temperature field is minimal), and atmosphere-only. A surface boundary layer temperature variance budget analysis computed in the frequency domain is shown to be a powerful tool for studying air–sea interactions, as it differentiates the relative contributions to the variability in the temperature field from each process across a range of time scales (from daily to multidecadal). This method compares terms in the ocean and atmosphere across the different model configurations to infer the underlying mechanisms driving temperature variability. I will also share some preliminary findings applying the same method to the ocean in the CESM global climate model. The Coastal Ocean and Environment Summer School in Ghana (COESSING; coessing.org) is an international collaboration aimed at building capacity in oceanographic and environmental sciences in Ghana. In this brief talk, I will share some of the highlights of the yearly school since it started in 2015 from my perspective as both a main organizer and the lead instructor for Python computing.