For those interested, on March 12 Isaac Held will be giving the physics departmental colloquium. Isaac is a climate dynamicist at NOAA/GFDL in Princeton New Jersey and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Date: 03/12/2014; 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Location: 340 West Hall
Title and abstract
"The response of the hydrological cycle to global warming"
While we anticipate that essentially all of the Earth's surface will warm in response to increasing greenhouse gases, the problem of how precipitation patterns will change is more complex. I will discuss this problem by focusing on three important parts of this response: 1) even with no change in atmospheric circulation, wet regions will tend to get wetter and dry regions drier; 2) the subtropical dry zones will drift polewards, and 3) the tropical rain belts will migrate towards the hemisphere that warms fastest. The value of a hierarchy of climate models of increasing complexity for addressing this and other climate change problems will be emphasized.
