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

该奖项将支持古气候研究和教育推广的创造性整合，以更好地了解地球自然气候演变中低纬度和高纬度气候过程的相互作用，并以有益于从事全球气候变化经济和政策方面的社会科学家的方式描述这种相互作用。一般来说，研究人员将使用一系列数值实验来研究低纬度热带气候的轨道强迫如何影响第四纪冰期期间高纬度冰盖的生长以及厄尔尼诺-南方涛动（ENSO）等气候事件的发生。 具体而言，研究人员将采取科学战略，调查热带气候对轨道强迫的反应所涉及的物理过程，将纯粹的轨道特征与热带气候中的冰期特征进行比较，调查轨道和冰川强迫对热带气候变化的相对影响，并研究低纬度和高纬度之间的远程连接如何随着平均气候状态的变化而改变（即，研究人员的长期科学目标得到了短期教育目标的补充，即为大学本科课程的发展提供定量的古气候学视角，涵盖气候变化的科学，经济和社会方面。

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.