Understanding and Projecting Change in the Marine Environment on Intraseasonal and Climate Time Scales

The goal of the research is to better understand how the atmosphere and ocean interact on time scales of days to a season, and project how the ocean may change over the next hundred years. This goal will be reached by the synergistic application of new statistical methods and dynamically-based models of the ocean. The research will focus primarily on physical variables but the impact of ocean changes on the spatial distribution and migration of several marine species will be examined.The research is organized under two themes. The first theme focuses on the marine impacts of climate change. It includes the projection of coastal flooding, and also the projection of ocean temperature, salinity and circulation to local scales (downscaling) and their influence on the distribution and movement of marine animals. An important goal of this theme is to quantify uncertainty in the projections of physical change and their impacts. The second theme focuses on global modes of variability of the atmosphere-ocean system on time scales of days to a season. It will be based primarily on observations but will use dynamical models to interpret the results.The proposed research is of both practical and scientific significance. It will lead to more realistic projections of the probability of coastal flooding over the next century that explicitly take into account the uncertainty in future global sea level and storminess. The results will be of practical interest to coastal engineers, coastal managers and policy makers. The downscaling of projections of ocean conditions will give a better understanding of the local expression of global change. The empirical associations between global scale patterns of atmosphere-ocean variables, and their interpretation in terms of physical mechanisms, will be useful in extending the useful range of subseasonal forecast systems.