CAREER: The Earth's Climate. Understanding the Past and Educating for the Future

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This award will support the creative integration of paleoclimate research and educational outreach to better understand the interplay of low- and high-latitude climate processes in Earth's natural climate evolution and to describe this interplay in a manner useful to social scientists engaged in the economic and policy aspects of global climate change. In general, the researcher will use a series of numerical experiments to examine how orbital forcing of low latitude tropical climates might impact high latitude ice sheet growth during the Quaternary Ice Ages and the occurrence of climatic events such as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Specifically, the researcher will pursue a scientific strategy to investigate the physical processes involved in the response of the tropical climate to orbital forcing, compare purely orbital signatures with glacial stage signatures in tropical climate, investigate the relative effects of orbital and glacial forcing on variability within tropical climates, and investigate how the telconnection between low and high latitudes might be altered as the mean climate state changes (i.e., when ice cover and atmospheric levels of CO2 change).The researcher's long-term scientific goals are complemented by a near-term educational goal of contributing a quantitative paleoclimatic perspective to the development of a university-wide undergraduate course covering the scientific, economic, and social aspects of climate change.