Jump to main content

Global Climate

Current climate change in a broader context

About the Research Group

The climate system is changing at unprecedented rates. Understanding the human influence compared to natural variability and natural forcings is critical for predicting the current and future course of global climate.

We investigate the dynamics that give rise to large-scale patterns of surface temperature, rainfall, winds, ocean currents and sea surface elevation, as well as to changes in these patterns over time. Such dynamics act on a wide range of time scales, from days or seasons to centuries and beyond.

Examples of dynamics on the time scale of days are midlatitude weather systems. For seasons it will be monsoons, when they occur and their intensity. When we look at the time scale of centuries and beyond, the large patterns are important, such as variation in the ocean thermohaline circulation, interactions with changing continents, topography, greenhouse gases and solar radiation.

We are interested in how such key processes give rise to past, present and future climate conditions.

Leader and co-leader

Strategic Projects

Illustrasjonsbilde

Proxy assimilation for reconstructing climate and improving model

The main objective of PARCIM is to create the first online millennium-long paleo-climate reanalysis, using modern data assimilation, model, and wealth of paleo-proxy archives.

Read more about this climate reconstruction here.

Illustrasjonsbilde

Dynamics of the North Atlantic surface and overturning circulation

The circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean is changing. One notable expression of these changes is a regional cooling that is in striking contrast to the global trend; the ‘warming hole’. While the similarity between this cooling and the fingerprint of a weakening circulation in climate models has been used to argue that the decline in circulation present in virtually all simulations of future climate is already underway, this interpretation is controversial and recent observations call the hypothesized mechanism into question.

We will analyze coupled climate models to clarify how currents and other features of the North Atlantic Ocean interact.

The Research Group