Scientists reveal link between ocean weather and global climate using mechanical analysis rather than statistical analysis

An international team of scientists has discovered the first direct evidence linking seemingly random weather systems in the ocean to climate on a global scale.Led by Hussein Aluie, associate professor in the University of Rochester’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and scientist at the university’s Laser Energetics Laboratory, the team scientific progress.

Weather patterns in the ocean are similar to those we experience on land, but on different time and length scales, said first author Benjamin Storer, a researcher in the Turbulence and Complex Flow Group in Alouye. Weather patterns over land may last several days and are about 500 kilometers wide, while ocean weather patterns, such as eddies, last three to four weeks but are about one-fifth the size of land weather patterns.

“Scientists have long speculated that these ubiquitous and seemingly random movements in the ocean are related to climate scales, but it has been obscured because it was not clear how to unravel this complex system to measure their interactions,” Alou said Yay said. “We developed a framework that does that. What we found was not what people expected because it required the mediation of atmosphere.”

The team’s goal is to understand how energy is transferred through different channels in the global ocean. They used mathematical methods developed by Aluie in 2019 and subsequently implemented into high-level code by Storer and Aluie, allowing them to study different modes of energy transfer from the Earth’s circumference to 10 kilometers. These techniques are then applied to ocean data sets from advanced climate models and satellite observations.

Research shows that ocean weather systems are stimulated or weakened as they interact with climate scales, with patterns that reflect global atmospheric circulation. The researchers also found that an atmospheric band near the equator called the Intertropical Convergence Zone produces 30% of global precipitation, causing massive energy transfers and creating ocean turbulence.

Studying such complex fluid motions occurring at multiple scales is not easy, Storey and Allouye said, but it has advantages over previous attempts to link weather to climate change. They believe the team’s work creates a promising framework for better understanding the climate system.

“There is a lot of interest in how global warming and climate change affect extreme weather events,” Aluye said. “Typically, such research efforts are based on statistical analysis, which requires extensive data to have confidence in uncertainties. We are taking a different approach based on mechanistic analysis, which alleviates some of these requirements and allows us to understand cause and effect more easily. relation. “

The team who played a central role in the investigation also included Michele Buzzicotti, a research scientist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata; Hemant Khatri, a research associate at the University of Liverpool (Hemant Khatri) and Princeton University senior scientist Stephen Griffies.