Program
- Program
- All Symposia by association
This symposium welcomes presentations of new research results in physical and biogeochemical oceanography not included in the other symposia. It explores oceanic processes of global relevance and those specific to different regions of the ocean, such as tropical, subtropical, subpolar, polar, marginal, and coastal seas. Relevant processes include water mass formation and interactions, large-scale and meso-scale circulations, interactions with other Earth system components (land, seafloor, atmosphere, and cryosphere), distribution and cycling of chemical elements and compounds, or pollution. Variability on different space and time scales will be considered and methodological approaches will range from in situ, autonomous, and satellite observations to numerical and laboratory studies.
This interdisciplinary symposium provides a joint forum for oceanographers whose research focuses on physical, chemical and biological processes in coastal zones, semi-enclosed and shelf seas of the World as well as their response to climate change and anthropogenic impacts. These areas are often characterized by complex interactions between land, ocean and atmosphere, they exhibit rich dynamics driven by a variety of feedbacks and forcing mechanisms. Marginal seas and coastal areas are particularly vulnerable to climate change effects and anthropogenic stressors. Given their limited geographical extension and their sometimes constricted connection to the open ocean, these environments often exhibit shorter timescales in their responses to external forcing: this is why they are widely recognized as natural "laboratories" for studying oceanic processes and interactions between the physical, biogeochemical and climatic spheres. They also play an exceptionally important role in ecosystem services and socio-economic issues and require careful governance measures to avoid or mitigate environmental deterioration. Gathering experts from different regions, the symposium will give a global perspective of the topic through comparison and elucidation of similarities and differences. Contributions on different regions are invited, related to themes such as innovative observational, theoretical, experimental and modelling studies of the hydrodynamics, marine biochemistry (e.g. nutrient dynamics, primary production, acidification, algae blooms) and the influence these regional seas and coastal zones exert on the adjacent basins/oceans and on the global scale. Studies of past, present and future climate variability are welcome, as well as interdisciplinary studies on the bio-physical interactions in the semi-enclosed and shelf seas.
Extreme sea levels (excluding tsunamis) emerge as a combination of regional mean sea level, astronomic tides, storm surges caused by extra-tropical or tropical storms, a dynamic wave component leading to wave-set up and runup, and, in detas and estuaries, river discharge. Resulting flooding events can have devastting impacts with wide ranging social, economic and environmental consequenses. In order to plan effective adaptation to coastal flooding hazards it is essential to improve the understanding of the superposition of the extreme sea level components, and how they are modulated by climate change and variability, individually and in combination. This symposium seeks contributions that have: (i) examined changes in extreme sea levels and waves including the role of climate change and variability (past and future); (ii) undertaken statistical or process-based amodel analyses of extreme water levels or its indivisual components; (iii) assesses the various types of impacts (e.g. inundation, ersion, ecosystem degradation; (iv) or taken an integrated approach toward flood hazard and vulnerability evaluation of coastal complex systems as a result of extreme sea levels.
Encompassing the largest ocean currents in the circumpolar mixing engine of the Southern Ocean to the narrow gaps of throughflows and overflows from Indonesia to Iceland, the meridional overturning circulation (MOC) is a system of currents that links the world’s oceans. With its global reach from surface to abyss, the MOC substantially influences the Earth’s cycles of heat, freshwater, and carbon.
Global climate models have projected a decline in Atlantic MOC strength in response to anthropogenic climate change since dynamic oceans were first included in the 1980s—a projection that remains to this day. However, complex global climate models rarely simulate collapses in MOC strength associated with passing tipping points, unlike more idealized models. Is MOC collapse a risk that has been overlooked?
MOC dynamics and variability link to key societal impacts such as coastal sea level, extreme heat and storms, temperature and precipitation patterns, and large-scale climate variability. This societal importance has motivated paleo-reconstructions, climate and ocean modelling on varying time and spatial scales, and in the past 20 years, direct observation of the MOC. We have learned a lot, but have also generated more questions.
This symposium welcomes abstracts on observations, theory, and numerical modelling of the MOC that address the burning questions that have yet to be answered and the timescales of change yet to be revealed.
Regional ocean modeling plays a crucial role in understanding and addressing marine and environmental challenges. These models simulate ocean processes and provide valuable insights into the behavior and dynamics of marine systems. This session aims to generate ideas and foster collaborations to tackle current challenges in regional ocean modeling. The session will cover topics such as an overview of regional ocean modeling, various modeling techniques, implementation and operation, coupled models and data assimilations, as well as model training and performance evaluation methods. We warmly invite researchers and modelers in ocean science to actively participate in this session.
Observation, quantification and simulation of the physical and biogeochemical processes that determine the Southern Ocean's state and transient response to external forcing are critical to our understanding of the carbon cycle, the climate system as a whole, and for reducing uncertainties in near-term climate projections. Advances in data collection, state estimation and modeling capabilities have finally established the necessary infrastructure to permit a deeper understanding of the Southern Ocean's processes that are relevant to climate. This session will present new results based on modeling and/or observational efforts that investigate biogeochemical processes, large-scale and mesoscale circulation, mixing, ocean-atmosphere and ocean-ice interactions, as well as strive to identify existing inconsistencies and assumptions that need to be re-examined.
In recent years, especially since the development of TEOS-10, there has been an increasing recognition that the properties of seawater, including not only its density, but also its chemical interactions and effects of speciation, depend on more than just a "salinity". This session, sponsored by the international Joint Committee on the Properties of Seawater (JCS) is devoted to investigations that explore the nature of such dependencies and their applications for calibration, measurement, and ocean physical dynamics and chemistry.
The session on interdisciplinary tsunami science highlights the rapid advancements in tsunami research, spurred by recent destructive global, regional, and local tsunami events. The diverse sources of tsunamis, as observed during the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai explosive volcanic eruption, emphasize the complexity of tsunamigenic processes across seabed, ocean, and atmospheric environments. These varied sources pose challenges for creating efficient, multi-source tsunami early warning systems. Additionally, local meteotsunamis generated by weather systems appear to be more frequent and catastrophic than quantified by tsunami catalogues, significantly increasing the risk of coastal hazards in marginal seas of southeastern Asia. This interdisciplinary session aims to unite experts from oceanography, atmospheric sciences, seismology, volcanology, geology, engineering, and social sciences to address tsunami hazards and risks, with the goal to foster new insights and develop community science approaches to enhance preparedness and integrally mitigate tsunami risks.
This session will cover the ocean dynamics and climate variability in the North Pacific focusing on, but not limited to, the Kuroshio and the Kuroshio extension region. Many oceanic and climate phenomena affect marginal seas and their neighboring countries in the North Pacific. Studies have shown that spatio-temporal variability of the Kuroshio current system, mesoscale eddies, and climate variabilities such as the ENSO and PDO are a few among those critical for understanding the North Pacific variability. This session seeks contributions on all aspects of the North Pacific variability as well as its interactions with neighboring seas, such as the tropical Pacific and Pacific marginal seas, based on both observational and modelling studies. We welcome contributions involving novel methods of measurements, comprehensive data analysis to reveal the ocean dynamics and climate variability as well as numerical studies and data assimilation for the ocean and climate prediction systems in the North Pacific and neighboring seas.
This joint session focuses on sciences related to seamless forecasting, including but not limited to turbulence observation for parameterization, air-sea interaction parameterization, ocean to climate model development for seamless forecasting. During the session, technological innovation which in favour of observing of turbulence, air-sea interaction and/or low-cost observation techniques supporting seamless forecasting are highly emphasized. The session will also explore new mechanisms governing air-sea interaction, with an emphasis on the role of ocean waves in regulating air-sea fluxes. Ocean to climate models for seamless forecasting are highly welcomed, including data assimilation schemes, high-performance computing, and AI-based forecasting. Applications for early-warning and thus contribute to the UN Ocean Decade are highly encouraged to our session.
The Indian Ocean is unique on the globe. Its northern boundary blocked by the continent of Asia, at a lower latitude, generates a strong monsoonal climate in the northern hemisphere, while the southern hemisphere is widely open to the Southern Ocean. Water inflows through the Indonesian Seas from the Pacific and the outflows to the Atlantic via the Agulhas Current system and also exchanges through the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, affecting the energy and mass balance within the sector. The Indian Ocean also interacts with the atmosphere through the surface boundaries, with the rivers through runoffs, and solid earth through the ocean bottom. All these give rise to many unique and important phenomena that are not observed in the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans. Since the countries on the rim of the Indian Ocean house about 30% of the World’s population, its influence on socio-economic values and the activities is quite high.
This symposium aims to summarize and highlight recent advances in ourunderstanding of Indian Ocean multi-disciplinary sciences. We invite papers on various aspects of Indian Ocean sciences, including, but not limited to, circulation and boundary currents, climate and monsoon variability, extreme events, air-sea interactions, ocean observations and data, impacts of climate change, biogeochemical processes, biology and ecology of the Indian Ocean. This session also invites papers describing programs, projects, activities and other significant contributions to showcase the ongoing or planned activities and the connection of ocean scientists with the broader agenda of sustainable development of oceans. We especially welcome contributions from international teams and consortia highlighting the power of international cooperation, capacity and knowledge sharing in a transdisciplinary context, e.g. the ongoing international activities such as the Second International Indian Ocean Expedition (IIOE-2) and the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (UNDOS).
The warming of both the ocean and atmosphere has been linked to an increase in extreme climate events, including heatwaves, which are expected to become more severe under global warming scenarios. This will pose significant threats to both natural and socioeconomic systems. Consequently, monitoring and understanding these extreme events are crucial to mitigate their impacts on environmental and human systems. This session aims to provide an updated comprehension of heatwaves across the ocean and atmosphere – past, present, and future – and their interactions, with a particular focus on their occurrences and impacts at various regions. Contributions on the advancement of heatwave prediction systems and research based on recent earth system models (CMIP6) are also a main focus.
The Arctic Ocean plays a pivotal role in global climate dynamics, serving as a sensitive barometer of environmental change and a crucial component of Earth's climate system. An increasing ocean heat storage, due to a decreasing Arctic sea ice cover, is one of the main uncertainties in the global Earth energy imbalance, which has nearly doubled in the recent decade. Relative to the global average surface air temperatures, the Arctic region has warmed nearly four times faster over the past four decades. Understanding the complex interplay between Arctic Ocean circulation, sea ice dynamics, and biogeochemical processes is essential for predicting regional and global climate responses to ongoing environmental perturbations. This session invites contributions spanning a spectrum of research topics involving observational, analytical, and modelling process-level to large scale studies, including Arctic Ocean circulation, sea ice dynamics and thermodynamics, physical an biogeochemical interactions, impacts of climate change, cross-disciplinary approaches, and studies of past polar changes, to advance our understanding and prediction of the coupled dynamics of the Arctic Ocean system.
In this joint symposium, we will explore how turbulence, internal waves, and mixing operate at different spatial and temporal scales in the ocean, atmosphere, and cryosphere, ranging from small-scale turbulent eddies to large-scale planetary waves. By studying these processes at different scales, we hope to understand their iimpact on climate dynamics, circulation patterns, and environmental balance, as well as their role in shaping the physical and biogeochemical properties of Earth's interconnected systems.
In addition, the symposium will address advances in observational techniques, modeling methodologies, and theoretical frameworks that contribute to our understanding of turbulence, internal waves, and mixing processes. Through interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and researchers from different fields, we aim to foster innovative approaches and develop comprehensive models that capture the complexity of these phenomena.
Ultimately, this symposium provides a platform to share knowledge, exchange ideas, and promote collaboration among researchers interested in unraveling the mysteries of turbulence, internal waves, and mixing in various domains of Earth's fluid dynamics.
The ocean is indispensable to life on Earth, influencing every facet of our planet. It regulates climate, weather patterns, food production, and more. However, human-made climate change has initiated a planetary crisis, reshaping the ocean’s natural evolution from surface to depth and altering its complex links with other Earth system components. The alarming rate of oceanic climate change, evident through key indicators and consecutive hitting records, coupled with the risk of tipping points, underscores the pressing need for deeper scientific knowledge. This deeper understanding, drawn from a range of sources including paleo proxies, contemporary observations, modelling, and indigenous knowledge, is essential for guiding effective action. Such action includes reversing the ocean health decline through increased stewardship, devising strategies to adapt and mitigate adverse impacts, and evaluating the cost-benefit of ocean-based solutions in combating human-induced climate change. In our session, we will explore the latest developments in monitoring, modelling, analysing the complex and ongoing climate changes occurring in our physical and biogeochemical ocean and their drivers and impacts. We welcome studies from paleo proxies, contemporary observations, modelling to indigenous/local perspectives, from global to local scales, including:
- Physical and biogeochemical changes (e.g. ocean warming, stratification, deoxygenation, acidification, rising sea levels, water mass formation and circulation changes, etc.).
- Mechanisms and drivers behind key ocean climate indicators.
- Future ocean change trends and tipping points.
- Impacts on marine life, biodiversity, and productivity.
- Impacts on society (e.g. alterations in rainfall patterns leading to droughts and floods).
We invite scientists, practitioners, policymakers, stakeholders, and general public around the world to join us for stimulating discussions and knowledge exchange. Let’s deepen our understanding of ocean change science and collaborate to address the urgent challenges facing our ocean and planet.
Compound events are defined as events that occur when a combination of drivers and/or hazards contribute to environmental or societal risks. These phenomena span a wide range of spatiotemporal scales and interaction types, including preconditioning, multiple variables, temporal compounding, and spatial compounding. The compound event concept has been recently adapted to a wider range of domains, including not only the atmosphere and bivariate events but also terrestrial ecosystems, the ocean, the cryosphere and inter-domain linkages. In this session, we welcome contributions that aim to understand their physical drivers, impacts and relevance for risk managing, using both observations and modelling. Submissions that focus on inter-domain linkages, advanced statistical methods, and new modelling approaches, including the use of large ensembles and extreme event attribution, are particularly encouraged.
The recent observations of rapid changes in surface temperatures, diminishing sea ice, and ice sheet alterations in the Antarctic, particularly in West Antarctica, underscore the pressing need to comprehend and address climate change within this region amid global warming. The cryosphere's significant influence on polar climate change, through its complex interactions with the atmosphere and ocean, adds layers of complexity to the evolving polar climate system. These underscore the critical need for a comprehensive understanding of the interactions between the atmosphere, ocean, and cryosphere to understand climate change in Antarctica. This session aims to enhance our understanding of Antarctic climate change by synthesizing diverse research findings that highlight the role of atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere interactions in the recent Antarctic climate change. We invite contributions of recent research on these interactions within the Antarctic climate system, from observational data and modeling studies.
Data assimilation (DA) has been used for decades in Earth systems modeling primarily to obtain observation-based estimates of the state of the systems. The resulting state estimates have served as initial conditions for numerical models and as the best estimate of the state of the systems in research studies. While the application of machine learning (ML) to Earth systems modeling has a much shorter history, it is arguably the most rapidly growing field of the discipline. ML models have been proposed to emulate computationally expensive physics-based components of numerical models, to estimate parameters of physics-based parameterization schemes of the numerical models, and to form hybrid models in which the numerical and ML component play a more equal role. DA requires an estimate of error statistics for both dynamical models and observations, and ML has been proposed for the estimation of parameters of the statistical models behind the DA schemes. In return, ML models are often trained on reanalyses data, which are state estimates produced by state-of-the-art DA systems. Not surprisingly, there are also ongoing efforts to integrate DA and ML more closely in Earth system modeling. Since many technical aspects of DA and ML are similar, we expect stimulating exchanges between participants from the two fields. We invite papers on all applications of DA, combinations of DA and ML to Earth system modelling, along with contributions that focus on model error, representation of uncertainties in initial and boundary conditions and their growth in forecasts. Furthermore, papers focusing on new observations and their processing in DA and the optimization of the global observing system either using operational numerical weather prediction DA and models or observing system simulation experiments are also encouraged.
Machine Learning (ML) for weather prediction has taken off, including models that threaten to completely replace dynamical models. Similar all-in-one ML models for earth-system modeling are under-development. Targeted ML models have been trained to predict particular Earth system phenomena. When combined with eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques, all these ML models can lead to improvements in our physical understanding, including sources of predictability and causal mechanisms. This session welcomes papers which use ML approaches to predict and/or understand future states of the atmosphere or the coupled Earth system. ML applications that estimate the past state of the atmosphere are more appropriate for the data assimilation symposium.
Improved understanding and prediction of weather and climate extremes underpins progress in developing policies and early warning systems that make communities more resilient. Extreme events occur on broad temporal and spatial scales, so improved prediction exploits sources of predictability on multiple scales that interact across various Earth system components. This symposium solicits contributions related to observational, synoptic-dynamical, statistical, and modeling studies on high-impact weather and atmospheric and oceanic climate extremes. Key challenges include documenting how extremes have varied or are likely to vary under a changing climate and how well climate models capture these events including compound events. Presentations that examine the dynamics of extreme events, assess model simulations, track observed extremes, and explore the extent humans are responsible for changes in extremes are all encouraged. Understanding underlying physical and dynamical processes for weather extremes includes diabatic effects on meso- and synoptic-scale dynamics. Simulation, prediction, and scientific understanding of extremes all increase resilience to high-impact weather on various time-scales and are within the scope of this symposium. Contributions on: observing strategies, field campaigns and demonstration projects, dynamical and statistical analysis methods, including methods using machine learning and artificial intelligence, communicating forecasts and their skill and uncertainties, weather impacts, marine extremes, and assessments of vulnerability and risk are all solicited.
Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) comprises the densest water in the major ocean basins, filling more than one-third of the ocean. AABW originates from the dense shelf waters (DSW) formed on the Antarctic continental shelf, which can overflow across the shelf break. During the descending processes over the continental slope, DSW entrains ambient waters to produce AABW. The AABW formation process ventilates the abyssal ocean and traps heat and carbon from the atmosphere for centuries, thereby playing a key role in the global ocean overturning circulation and climate.
AABW has warmed, freshened, and declined in volume around the globe in recent decades. Recent studies based on sparse observations show that the volume of AABW is declining more rapidly than expected, which was highlighted as one of the ten scientific breakthroughs in the year 2023 by Science journal. Despite the key role of AABW in regulating Earth’s climate on long time scales, the formation and variability of AABW remains poorly understood due to limitations in observations and modelling. Under global warming, the abyssal circulation driven by AABW formation is projected to slow down further, which has strong implications for the future global heat and carbon budgets.
This symposium invites contributions related to the formation processes, variability and trends in AABW, both historical and future projections. We welcome all contributions related to observational, theoretical, and modelling studies of AABW and its impacts.
The Pacific Ocean, with its vast expanse and immense heat storage capacity, plays a central role in the Earth's climate system. The intricate interplay of oceanic processes within the Pacific and their interactions with the atmosphere give rise to some of the world's most influential climate modes, such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)/Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO), which have far-reaching impacts on regional and global climate patterns. As climate change progresses, understanding the variability and changes occurring within the Pacific becomes increasingly vital. This session aims to provide a platform for sharing and discussing recent progresses in understanding the Pacific Ocean dynamics and its role in climate. We solicit contributions from a broad range of topics, including but not limited to tropical variability (ENSO, Indo-Pacific-Atlantic interbasin exchange, teleconnections), extratropical variability (PDO/IPO, boundary currents, ocean fronts and eddies), tropical-extratropical interactions, as well as upscale impacts of oceanic small-scale processes, ocean heat uptake and sea level. All research activities ranging from observation-based studies to modelling efforts and from basin-scale studies to regionally-focused investigations are welcome.
The ocean and atmosphere communicate through fluxes of heat, mass, momentum, and gases. These fluxes drive extreme weather events, such as tropical and extratropical cyclones, and are affected by the physical state of the ocean's surface and air-sea interface in ways that are not well understood. At the other extreme of weak winds, reversals in the sign of the air-sea momentum flux have been observed in the presence of ocean swells, and wind gustiness becomes important. Strong surface currents and sharp horizontal gradients of sea surface temperature also drive air-sea momentum and heat fluxes that can rectify onto the mean state. This session invites contributions that use observations, models, laboratory experiments, statistics, or theory to advance our understanding of air-sea fluxes in extreme conditions. The intent is to provide a friendly platform for the exchange of ideas and to facilitate collaboration between different observing, modeling, and experimental groups.
Paleoclimate research provides information on climate dynamics through time based on proxy reconstructions or model simulations of physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of the earth system. Understanding the nature and mechanisms of past climate changes in general and particularly of the past warm periods has the potential to provide context and insight into climate and sea-level response to human activities over the industrial period and into the future, as well as the impacts of such climate change on the environment. This symposium invites researchers who investigate the long-term behavior of the climate system and of the environment in the past and how it is projected to change in the future. We encourage both modelers and empirical scientists who focus on different aspects of the climate system to participate.
The tropical Pacific SST is robustly projected to increase in models with a local maximum in warming on the equator and more warming in the eastern than the western side of the basin. However, the robustness of the projected zonal gradient weakening has been questioned because CMIP5/6 models fail to capture observed tropical Pacific SST trends. In the recent past, the tropical Pacific has undergone a significant cooling particularly in the eastern basin, whereas the CMIP models simulate a warming under the historical forcing.
The spatial patterns of tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are closely coupled to the large-scale atmospheric circulations in the tropics and are particularly important because the accompanying shifts in the location of deep convection are communicated into the extratropics by atmospheric Rossby waves. SST patterns influence shifts in the major rainfall variability over the ocean, leading to, for example, an increase in the frequency of extreme El Niño events. They influence the occurrence of marine heatwaves, monsoon systems and the pathways of tropical cyclones and modulate global climate feedbacks associated with cloud and lapse rate changes.
This session will consider submissions on reconciling observed and modelled trends in topical Pacific SST trends, theories for changes in SST patterns, and implication of pattern trends in future projections.
The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), one of the most important drivers on climate variability, has profound climatic, environmental, economical, and societal impacts on both global and regional climate. Evidences, albeit limited, suggest that the basic characteristics of ENSO, including its types, amplitude, frequency, asymmetry, teleconnections etc., have been undergoing changes. However, projections for potential future changes are diverse and the whole issue of how ENSO may respond to global warming and thus contribute to the global and regional climatic and environmental changes is far from understood and is an important subject of intense research worldwide. This symposium invites contributions regarding the latest scientific advances on observational, theoretical and modeling studies on: ENSO dynamics, ENSO impacts, ENSO predictability and prediction, and ENSO projected changes and the associated impacts due to projected climate change scenarios.
Interaction between the ocean and atmosphere plays an important role in many aspects of climate variability, predominantly from (sub)seasonal timescales upwards. The associated teleconnections cover the globe and can also interact with other systems such as the land and cryosphere. The long timescales inherent in such coupled variability provide an invaluable source of skill for near-term climate predictions in particular. Coupled variability on decadal and longer timescales is of increasing importance in the attribution and interpretation of emerging anthropogenic effects, and the longer term forced climate change signal is also significantly affected by ocean-atmosphere coupling. This symposium welcomes contributions of theoretical, modelling and observational work related to ocean-atmosphere variability and change. Specific topics covered by the symposium include but are not limited to: Tropical coupled variability and teleconnections; mechanisms of mid-latitude air-sea interaction; the role of ocean frontal zones and eddies in the coupled system; representation of air-sea interaction and teleconnections in climate models; role of ocean variability in decadal climate variability and near-term climate predictability; and ocean-atmosphere coupling under climate change.
Science research and field studies on natural hazards and their impact in the atmosphere, cryosphere, and ocean are the focus of this session. Presentations are welcome on the wide variety of hazards that affect our environment. Rapid warming has caused changes in the cryosphere at unprecedented rates, with significant impacts on landscapes and ecosystems. The atmosphere is witnessing dramatic heatwaves, extreme weather events, and atmospheric rivers - many of which are proving to be costly both from a human lives and economic standpoints. The ocean is experiencing warming, significant changes in sea ice, as well as sea level rise. Risks include avalanches, landslides, lake outbursts, volcano-ice interactions, permafrost thaw, and impacts on mountain communities. Storm damage, flooding, record heat, coastal erosion, cold air-outbreaks, blizzards, changing severe weather regions are additional risks rising from today’s natural hazards.
There is a growing interest in the research and application communities in developing sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S: 2 weeks to a season) and seasonal to decadal (S2D: seasons to a decade) forecasts. This session invites contributions that span all aspects of meteorological and oceanographic prediction in the 2 weeks to a decade time range. The session will include both meteorological and impact studies. Contributions are welcome for studies of phenomena such as the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO), ENSO, IOD, AMO, tropical/extratropical waves, ocean-atmosphere coupling, stratospheric variability, and stratosphere - troposphere coupling, in addition to studies of predictability/skill of oceanic,atmospheric or surface variables and case studies of high impact weather events. Contribution regarding impacts studies at the S2S and S2D time-range are welcome, including, but not limited to, the areas of hydrology, health, fire, agriculture, and energy. These can include modeling studies of the impacts right through to presentations of how S2S and S2D-derived information can be integrated into decision support systems at the local, regional and country level. Studies of prediction for marine and terrestrial ecosystems are also highly welcome.
The interaction of trace gases and aerosols across the atmosphere-ice-ocean interface has both direct and indirect impacts on air quality, marine ecosystems, and the climate system at local to global scales. For example, changing a sea-ice environment in the polar oceans affects air-sea exchanges of chemically, biologically, and climatically active trace gases and aerosol particles. Understanding these atmosphere-cryosphere-ocean interactions and how they will evolve with changing climate and precursor emissions/depositions, is a key research area needed. This session is proposed to encourage submission of studies using results from field campaigns, remote sensing, laboratory measurements, and/or modeling to promote our understanding of the biogeochemical interactions across the atmosphere-ice-ocean and their impact on current, past, and future atmospheric sciences and biogeochemical feedback. We also propose to accept studies with various time scales and on all spatial scales (e.g., from the sea surface microlayer to the global ocean), and to discuss open questions and summarize new findings on the interactions above.
Under global warming, sea-level rise is one of the most critical issues in a changing world. As the largest potential contributor to the global sea-level rise, the Antarctic Ice Sheet mainly loses its mass to iceberg calving and basal melting of ice shelves. The retreat of ice shelves is not only susceptible to warming in adjacent water masses but also the unprecedented changes in sea ice and atmospheric forcing. However, substantial uncertainties still surround the response of the ice shelves to the changing climate, leading to confusion among the public and policy-making communities.
Basal melting of ice shelves is determined by interactions between the basal surface of ice shelves and adjacent water masses, including dense shelf water, seasonally warmed surface water, and warm deep water. Dense shelf water is mainly produced by brine rejection from sea ice formation, and coastal sea ice opening in early spring favors the formation of warm surface water. Warm deep water originates from the cross-slope intrusions of Circumpolar Deep Water in the Southern Ocean. Consequently, not only the local atmospheric forcing and sea ice evolution exert a strong influence on ice shelves, but also the remote water mass transformations in the Southern Ocean can threaten the ice shelf stability. However, knowledge of the phenomenon is still lacking due to spare observations, and theoretical understanding is also limited due to poor representations of key processes in numerical models.
This joint session intends to build an improved understanding of the responses of ice shelves to changing climate and how these responses may feed back into the climate system. Contributions concerning the corresponding processes around Antarctica using various approaches are welcome. To keep the joint interest, we particularly encourage contributions focusing on the interactions between ice shelves, ocean, and sea ice in the complex Antarctic climate system.
Ocean-driven melting of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets is accelerating and is a key process contributing to the significant uncertainty associated with estimates of future sea level rise. Ice sheet-ocean interactions range across spatial scales: from the microscale processes governing melt at the ice-ocean boundary layer, through the buoyancy-driven circulation beneath ice shelves and at tidewater glaciers, to large-scale fjord and open ocean circulation patterns; and across a range of timescales: in response to seasonal fluctuations in warm water supply to the ice-ocean front to multi-decadal and centennial oscillations in response to intrinsic ice and ocean dynamic processes. Further, anomalous freshwater from the mass loss of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets is not represented by the majority of coupled climate models, with implications to projections of global climate. Modelling efforts incorporating increased polar freshwater input show a range of physical responses, impacting sea ice at the high latitudes to precipitation in the tropics, and causing surface ocean cooling but deep warming, affecting the ocean circulation. Importantly, these changes in the temperature structure and circulation of the ocean have the potential to feedback onto ice shelf melting. This symposium brings together both ice and ocean researchers as well as global climate modellers working in the areas of interactions between ice sheets, ice shelves, tidewater glaciers, icebergs, the ocean and the broader climate system, across a range of spatial and temporal scales. The session will cover theoretical, observational, and modelling disciplines. Studies that offer new insights and technologies to improve understanding of ice-ocean interactions and their impacts are particularly welcomed.
A symposium convened by the Joint Commission on Ice-Ocean Interactions (JCIOI) and the Southern Ocean Freshwater Input from Antarctica (SOFIA) committee members.
Discussions and field trials of ice and ocean geoengineering - either to reduce rates of sea level rise, or to use the oceans to draw down atmospheric CO2 - are moving forward. That humanity is not ready to operationally deploy any of these possible solutions is clear, and numerous concerns with the current concepts have been raised. However, ocean engineering tests are occurring, and some argue that we should develop ice intervention capabilities, and that these technical approaches must be explored given the cost of addressing almost certain impacts in the global coastal infrastructure. Still others point to what might be learned from pilot ‘active experiments’ in the ocean or on the ice as a way of improving sea level rise forecasts. We offer a forum for presenting and discussing the science and engineering of this emerging debate in the polar science community.
The reaction of sea ice to global climate change is remarkable compared to other geophysical variables. The sea ice coverage occupies approximately 4-9% of the global ocean surface and the associated high albedo of sea ice controls energy interactions between the atmosphere and ocean. Therefore, it is important to observe and monitor sea ice parameters from which its impact on global climate can be examined. Satellite passive microwave observation has provided a majority of broad and consistent information on the spatial distribution of sea ice such as sea ice concentration and extent. In addition, following previous and in-orbit passive microwave sensors, the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR) 3 and Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer (CIMR), which are advanced microwave sensors with much finer ground resolution and additional microwave channels, will become operational in 2024 and 2029, respectively. Beyond such a traditional approach, several innovative methods for estimating other sea ice parameters (e.g., sea ice temperature, type, thickness, drift, snow depth on sea ice, etc.) have been developed recently incorporating various kinds of satellite microwave observations, such as scatterometers, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and radar altimeters. This session aims to highlight recent progress made in microwave remote sensing of the sea ice system including novel methods (e.g., machine learning and multi-satellite synergy), topics related to applications of the remotely-sensed products in climate analysis, data assimilation, climate model assessment, and other interdisciplinary studies.
In recent years, great efforts have been made focusing on deepening our understanding of climate change and its impacts. International programs on both global (e.g., the Future Earth) and regional scales (e.g., the A3 Foresight Program) have been connecting researchers from multidisciplinary fields. The polar region, as one of the most important sensitive areas to climate change and an amplifier of climate change, is crucial for understanding climate change and making strategies. This session explores polar and tropical connections in both the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere, as well as their seasonal expressions and hemispheric differences. Discussions will be centered on the degree of influence of polar climate change on lower latitudes from observational, modeling, and theoretical perspectives, including influences on mid-latitude and tropical atmospheric dynamics, ocean circulation and sea surface temperature patterns, energy transports, and global warming. Research on polar-induced climate change impacts over lower latitudes (including extreme events, tipping points, etc.), as well as discussions of possible coping strategies for Future Earth are particularly encouraged.
Sea level rise is a significant consequence of climate change, representing an unavoidable and irreversible reality. The rapid depletion of the cryosphere has emerged as the primary catalyst driving recent sea level increases. Accurately assessing the pace, extent, and regional variations of cryospheric thawing is essential for refining future sea level projections in a warming world. Our session aims to elucidate the complex interactions among the cryosphere, atmosphere, ocean, and lithosphere that influence the dynamics of rapid cryospheric changes. We seek to present the latest findings from observational and modeling studies using cutting-edge technologies, contributing to a deeper understanding of these processes. Discussions will encompass variability on various time scales, ranging from paleoclimate to present and future, as well as changes on different spatial scales, from local glaciers to continents. Furthermore, we strive to facilitate substantive discussions on the strategic orientation of research endeavors and the necessity for international collaboration. By consolidating our efforts, we aim to reduce uncertainties in future sea level rise projections, guiding a more resilient course for our planet's future.
Starting with highly simplified representations of atmosphere and ocean dynamics and snow and sea ice physics in the earliest coupled ocean-atmosphere circulation model of Manabe and Bryan in 1969, Earth System Model complexity has substantially increased over time. With better understanding, resolution, model infrastructure and computational resources, the range of physical atmosphere, cryosphere and ocean processes that can be directly represented in Earth System Models has increased, but large uncertainties remain. Processes acting on small spatial scales can benefit from improved parameterisations. Meanwhile, challenges also arise due to the range of timescales upon which different processes in the Earth System act. For this reason, dynamics of ice sheets and glaciers are still often investigated with separate offline models. This symposium will welcome submissions on all aspects of development, evaluation and prediction from the atmosphere, cryosphere and oceans components of Earth System Models, either separately or interacting.