Dr. Deepak Chandan, U. Toronto
13 octobre 2020
Paleoclimate modeling emerged as an area of active international research not long after Norman Philips in 1956 published what are now regarded as the first results from a numerical General Circulation model of the atmosphere. As the complexity of GCMs continued to increase and several models of the climate system came to be coupled together, paleoclimate modelling maintained its position on the vanguards of numerical climate modeling by taking the models developed for present day purposes and applying them in (sometimes) entirely different and untested conditions. This symbiotic relationship has been hugely beneficial to climate modelling efforts as insights gained from these endeavours directly fed back into model development. Indeed, the Paleoclimate Modeling Intercomparison Project (PMIP) which was founded in the early 1990s following the success of the AMIP was one of the earliest “MIPs”.
In this talk I will discuss results from the application of modern-day coupled atmosphere-ocean-land-sea ice GCMs to two intervals in the recent past that are of considerably interest to the paleo climate community — the mid-Pliocene warm period (~3 million years ago) and the mid-Holocene (6000-8000 years ago). I will discuss results from in-house experiments performed with the UofT-CCSM4 model as well as results of multi-model comparisons undertaken for the fourth (and ongoing) phase of PMIP.