As one might expect, the world’s oceans have a profound effect on the Climate. The question becomes how do we measure the ocean’s affects on Climate Change?
“Scientists have long speculated that these ubiquitous and seemingly random motions in the ocean communicate with climate scales, but it has always been vague because it wasn’t clear how to disentangle this complex system to measure their interactions,” says Aluie. “We developed a framework that can do exactly that. What we found was not what people were expecting because it requires the mediation of the atmosphere.”
This illustration by Benjamin Storer shows oceanic weather systems (mesoscale eddies) from data overlaid with atmospherically driven climate-scale currents (black lines), which can be extracted with a coarse-graining technique developed in the lab of Hussein Aluie. The image reveals how these ocean weather systems are energized (red) or weakened […]