A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(December 2017) |
Axel Timmermann | |
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Citizenship | Germany |
Alma mater | University of Hamburg Philipp University of Marburg |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Climate dynamics, physical oceanography, dynamical systems' analysis, theoretical physics |
Institutions | Institute for Basic Science Pusan National University University of Hawaii |
Website | IBS Center for Climate Physics |
Axel Timmermann is a German climate physicist and oceanographer with an interest in climate dynamics, human migration, dynamical systems' analysis, ice-sheet modeling and sea level. He served a co-author of the IPCC Third Assessment Report [1] and a lead author of IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. [2] His research has been cited over 18,000 times and has an h-index of 70 and i10-index of 161. [3] In 2017, he became a Distinguished Professor at Pusan National University and the founding Director of the Institute for Basic Science Center for Climate Physics. In December 2018, the Center began to utilize a 1.43-petaflop Cray XC50 supercomputer, named Aleph, for climate physics research. [4] [5] [6] [7]
He received a B.S. in physics and M.S. in theoretical physics in 1992 and 1995, respectively, from the University of Marburg in Germany. He worked as a research assistant for several years at the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology before completing a Ph.D. in meteorology in 1999 at the University of Hamburg.
Timmermann worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Netherlands and Hawaii before becoming a principal investigator of the DFG Research Group at the Institut fuer Meerskunde in Kiel. In 2004 he moved to Hawaii and worked as an Associate Professor and later Full Professor in the Department of Oceanography, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, University of Hawaii. In 2017, he relocated to Busan, South Korea to head up the new IBS Center for Climate Physics in Pusan University. He has been a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher in the cross-field category in 2018, [8] [9] 2019, [10] [11] and 2023 and also environment and ecology in 2020 and 2021.
El Niño is an oceanic and atmospheric phenomenon that marks the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). It is associated with a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific, including the area off the west coast of South America. The ENSO is the cycle of warm and cold sea surface temperature (SST) of the tropical central and eastern Pacific Ocean.
La Niña is an oceanic and atmospheric phenomenon that is the colder counterpart of El Niño, as part of the broader El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern. The name La Niña originates from Spanish for "the girl", by analogy to El Niño, meaning "the boy". In the past, it was also called an anti-El Niño and El Viejo, meaning "the old man."
El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an irregular periodic variation in winds and sea surface temperatures over the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean, affecting the climate of much of the tropics and subtropics. The warming phase of the sea temperature is known as El Niño and the cooling phase as La Niña. The Southern Oscillation is the accompanying atmospheric component, coupled with the sea temperature change: El Niño is accompanied by high air surface pressure in the tropical western Pacific and La Niña with low air surface pressure there. The two periods last several months each and typically occur every few years with varying intensity per period.
The Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere program (TOGA) was a ten-year study (1985–1994) of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) aimed specifically at the prediction of climate phenomena on time scales of months to years.
Sea surface temperature (SST), or ocean surface temperature, is the ocean temperature close to the surface. The exact meaning of surface varies according to how we measure it. It is between 1 millimetre (0.04 in) and 20 metres (70 ft) below the sea surface. Sea surface temperatures greatly modify air masses in the Earth's atmosphere within a short distance of the shore. Local areas of heavy snow can form in bands downwind of warm water bodies within an otherwise cold air mass. Warm sea surface temperatures can develop and strengthen cyclones over the Ocean. Experts call this process tropical cyclogenesis. Tropical cyclones can also cause a cool wake. This is due to turbulent mixing of the upper 30 metres (100 ft) of the ocean. Sea surface temperature changes during the day. This is like the air above it, but to a lesser degree. There is less variation in sea surface temperature on breezy days than on calm days. Ocean currents, such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, can affect sea surface temperatures over several decades. Thermohaline circulation has a major impact on average sea surface temperature throughout most of the world's oceans.
The Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) is a robust, recurring pattern of ocean-atmosphere climate variability centered over the mid-latitude Pacific basin. The PDO is detected as warm or cool surface waters in the Pacific Ocean, north of 20°N. Over the past century, the amplitude of this climate pattern has varied irregularly at interannual-to-interdecadal time scales. There is evidence of reversals in the prevailing polarity of the oscillation occurring around 1925, 1947, and 1977; the last two reversals corresponded with dramatic shifts in salmon production regimes in the North Pacific Ocean. This climate pattern also affects coastal sea and continental surface air temperatures from Alaska to California.
The South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ), a reverse-oriented monsoon trough, is a band of low-level convergence, cloudiness and precipitation extending from the Western Pacific Warm Pool at the maritime continent south-eastwards towards French Polynesia and as far as the Cook Islands. The SPCZ is a portion of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) which lies in a band extending east–west near the Equator but can be more extratropical in nature, especially east of the International Date Line. It is considered the largest and most important piece of the ITCZ, and has the least dependence upon heating from a nearby landmass during the summer than any other portion of the monsoon trough. The SPCZ can affect the precipitation on Polynesian islands in the southwest Pacific Ocean, so it is important to understand how the SPCZ behaves with large-scale, global climate phenomenon, such as the ITCZ, El Niño–Southern Oscillation, and the Interdecadal Pacific oscillation (IPO), a portion of the Pacific decadal oscillation.
The Western Hemisphere Warm Pool (WHWP) is a region of sea surface temperatures (SST) warmer than 28.5 °C that develops west of Central America in the spring, then expands to the tropical waters to the east.
The Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) is the largest element of the intraseasonal variability in the tropical atmosphere. It was discovered in 1971 by Roland Madden and Paul Julian of the American National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). It is a large-scale coupling between atmospheric circulation and tropical deep atmospheric convection. Unlike a standing pattern like the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Madden–Julian oscillation is a traveling pattern that propagates eastward, at approximately 4 to 8 m/s, through the atmosphere above the warm parts of the Indian and Pacific oceans. This overall circulation pattern manifests itself most clearly as anomalous rainfall.
The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), also known as Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (AMV), is the theorized variability of the sea surface temperature (SST) of the North Atlantic Ocean on the timescale of several decades.
Sverdrup Gold Medal Award – is the American Meteorological Society's award granted to researchers who make outstanding contributions to the scientific knowledge of interactions between the oceans and the atmosphere.
The Mindanao Current (MC) is a southward current in the western Pacific Ocean that transports mass and freshwater between ocean basins. It is a low-latitude western boundary current that follows the eastern coast of the Philippine island group and its namesake, Mindanao. The MC forms from the North Equatorial Current (NEC) that flows from east to west between 10-20°N. As it travels west, the NEC reaches its western limit: the coast of the Philippines. Once it encounters shallower waters near land, it “splits” into two branches: one moves northward and becomes the Kuroshio current and one moves southward and becomes the Mindanao Current. The process of splitting is called a bifurcation.
The Atlantic Equatorial Mode or Atlantic Niño is a quasiperiodic interannual climate pattern of the equatorial Atlantic Ocean. It is the dominant mode of year-to-year variability that results in alternating warming and cooling episodes of sea surface temperatures accompanied by changes in atmospheric circulation. The term Atlantic Niño comes from its close similarity with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) that dominates the tropical Pacific basin. For this reason, the Atlantic Niño is often called the little brother of El Niño. The Atlantic Niño usually appears in northern summer, and is not the same as the Atlantic Meridional (Interhemispheric) Mode that consists of a north-south dipole across the equator and operates more during northern spring. The equatorial warming and cooling events associated with the Atlantic Niño are known to be strongly related to rainfall variability over the surrounding continents, especially in West African countries bordering the Gulf of Guinea. Therefore, understanding of the Atlantic Niño has important implications for climate prediction in those regions. Although the Atlantic Niño is an intrinsic mode to the equatorial Atlantic, there may be a tenuous causal relationship between ENSO and the Atlantic Niño in some circumstances.
The Tropical Atlantic SST Dipole refers to a cross-equatorial sea surface temperature (SST) pattern that appears dominant on decadal timescales. It has a period of about 12 years, with the SST anomalies manifesting their most pronounced features around 10–15 degrees of latitude off of the Equator. It is also referred to as the interhemispheric SST gradient or the Meridional Atlantic mode.
Amy C. Clement is an atmospheric and marine scientist studying and modeling global climate change at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.
Pacific Meridional Mode (PMM) is a climate mode in the North Pacific. In its positive state, it is characterized by the coupling of weaker trade winds in the northeast Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Baja California with decreased evaporation over the ocean, thus increasing sea surface temperatures (SST); and the reverse during its negative state. This coupling develops during the winter months and spreads southwestward towards the equator and the central and western Pacific during spring, until it reaches the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), which tends to shift north in response to a positive PMM.
Ocean dynamical thermostat is a physical mechanism through which changes in the mean radiative forcing influence the gradients of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean and the strength of the Walker circulation. Increased radiative forcing (warming) is more effective in the western Pacific than in the eastern where the upwelling of cold water masses damps the temperature change. This increases the east-west temperature gradient and strengthens the Walker circulation. Decreased radiative forcing (cooling) has the opposite effect.
Delia Wanda Oppo is an American scientist who works on paleoceanography where she focuses on past variations in water circulation and the subsequent impact on Earth's climate system. She was elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2014.
June-Yi Lee is an atmospheric scientist at Pusan National University known for her use of models to investigate the atmosphere and the ocean under future climate scenarios.
Laurie Menviel or L. Menviel; Laurie Menviel is a palaeoclimatologist, and a Scientia fellow, at the University of New South Wales, who was awarded a Dorothy Hill Medal in 2019.