New models and observations of the Southern Ocean, its role in global climate and the carbon cycle

• Professor Andrew Watson FRS, University of East Anglia, UK

Biography not yet available

• Professor John Marshall, MIT, USA

Biography not yet available

• Professor Mike Meredith, British Antarctic Survey, UK

Biography

Michael Meredith leads the Polar Oceans strategic research programme at the British Antarctic Survey. Dr. Meredith is Chair of the Southern Ocean Observing System (SOOS), and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI). Amongst other activities, he is a member of POGO (the Partnership for Observations of the Global Ocean), and an invited PI on the United States Palmer Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program. Following completion of his doctorate, he conducted physical oceanographic research at UEA, where he was awarded a NERC Fellowship. He has also previously worked at the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, Liverpool, where he led a project concerned with understanding the time-dependency of high-latitude ocean circulation. Dr. Meredith has worked in both Arctic and Antarctic regions, with particular expertise in understanding the role of the ocean in climate change and variability using combinations of direct measurements, remote sensing and numerical modelling. He has conducted numerous field campaigns in the polar regions, and has authored or co-authored more than 80 journal papers on the the imoprtance of these environments.

• Dr Robert Anderson, LDEO, USA

Biography

Robert F Anderson is a Ewing-Lamont Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University, New York.  He studies the ocean carbon cycle and its sensitivity to global change. His interests span a range of topics and time scales, from climate-related changes in the ocean's carbon budget across late-Pleistocene glacial cycles to predicting the ocean's response to global warming, and the implications for the ocean's uptake of fossil fuel CO2. Of particular interest are changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation associated with abrupt climate variability during the last glacial period.  These events are thought to hold clues to the interhemispheric teleconnections that influence the Southern Ocean where deep waters exchange carbon dioxide and other gases with the atmosphere, and where ecosystems are particularly sensitive to environmental perturbations in ways that may impact the ocean's carbon cycle. He received the A.G. Huntsman Award for Excellence in Marine Science, is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and has published more than 130 peer reviewed papers. 

• Dr Dorothee Bakker, University of East Anglia, UK

Biography

Dorothee Bakker is a Research Officer in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. After an MSc in Soil Science (Wageningen University), she has studied the marine carbon cycle since 1991. Her research is on processes controlling the carbon sink in shelf seas and the oceans on seasonal and year-to-year time scales, notably the role of marine biota, ocean circulation, iron supply, sea ice and ocean acidification. Dorothee has a strong interest in access to marine biogeochemical data. She coordinates the Surface Ocean CO₂ Atlas (SOCAT) (www.socat.info), an activity by the international ocean carbon research community with the second SOCAT release planned for June 2013. She is co-chair of SCOR (Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research) Working Group 131, which has created a data base of iron enrichment experiments. Dorothee supervises 3 PhD students and has trained 4 PhD graduates. She is the author of 40 peer-reviewed articles and 3 book chapters.

• Professor Raffaele Ferrari, MIT, USA

Biography

Raffaele Ferrari, Breene M Kerr Professor of Physical Oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies the dynamics of the ocean circulation and its role in shaping climate and climate change. A major thrust of his research is to understand how ocean turbulence affects the circulation and biological productivity of the oceans. He is a leading PI of three observational programs, one in the Southern Ocean and two in the North Atlantic, focused on measuring the rate at which mesoscale eddies mix through the oceans heat, salt, carbon and other climatologically important tracers. From 2003 to 2008, he lead a multi-institution US Climate Process Team to improve the representation of ocean turbulence in climate models. He is the Director of the MIT Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate.

• Dr Sarah Gille, University of California San Diego, USA

Biography not yet available

• Professor Karen J Heywood, University of East Anglia, UK

Biography

Karen Heywood is a Professor of Physical Oceanography in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. She has been at UEA since 1989, where she teaches and undertakes research in ocean physics.  She originally did a physics degree followed by a PhD in physical oceanography. She is particularly interested in observing the polar oceans, and the interaction of the oceans with ice. She has led many research cruises to the polar regions. She is the leader of the UEA Seaglider group which owns and operates a fleet of four Seagliders used to investigate multidisciplinary ocean processes worldwide. She enjoys interacting with the public and is leading an exhibit entitled 'A Pinch of Salt' for the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition in 2013.

• Dr Andy Hogg, ANU, Australia

Biography

Dr Andy Hogg is a physical oceanographer who has contributed to our understanding of the dynamics of global-scale ocean circulation, particularly in the Southern Ocean. He was the primary developer of a high-resolution model used for the investigation of the role of eddy processes in ocean circulation, and has demonstrated that these smaller-scale processes (not simulated by most ocean-climate models) can have controlling influences on the global scale flow. He has also helped to formulate the mechanical energy budget and driving forces for the oceans and contributed to a new understanding of the way the Southern Ocean will respond to variations in wind stress and climate change. Dr Hogg  holds a position as an Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow at the Australian National University, and is a founding Chief Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

• Dr Mario Hoppema, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany

Biography

Dr Mario Hoppema is a senior scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany. By training he is a chemist, having studied at the University of Leiden in his home country the Netherlands. Ph.D. research on the carbon and oxygen cycles of the nearby Wadden Sea and coastal North Sea was conducted at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research at Texel. Since 1992 he has worked on the carbon cycle and biogeochemistry of the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean at AWI and the University of Bremen. Data have been collected at several long cruises with RV “Polarstern” (and once with RRS “James Cook”) and results were published in some 50 peer-reviewed publications. Hoppema has participated in several EU projects, the actual one being CARBOCHANGE IP. He is topic editor of the journal Ocean Science and has been guest editor of some special issues. He was involved in the major data rescue and quality control effort CARINA where he was leading the Southern Ocean part.

• Professor Corinne Le Quéré, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia, UK

Biography

Corinne Le Quéré is Professor of Climate Change Science and Policy at the University of East Anglia and Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. She conducts research on the interactions between climate change and the carbon cycle. She developed and used models to understand and quantify the effectiveness of the oceans to take up anthropogenic CO2, and how that changes through time. Her work suggests that the recent strenghtening of Southern Ocean winds has slowed down the increase in the ocean CO2 sink. Prof Le Quéré was author of the 3rd, 4th and 5th (ongoing) Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and co-Chairs the Global Carbon Project. She is originally from Canada, and conducted research in Princeton, Paris, and Jena, Germany. She received an Award from the French Academy of Sciences in 2012.

• Dr James R Ledwell, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA

Biography

Dr Ledwell studied physics at Boston College and the University of Massachusetts before moving to Harvard University to study atmospheric science with Profs. Michael McElroy, Steven Wofsy, Richard Goody and Richard Lindzen. Finishing his PhD in 1982, he moved to Goddard Institute of Space Studies, to work with James Hansen and Inez Fung, and to Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, encouraged and guided by Wallace S. Broecker. That was also the start of an ongoing collaboration with Professor Andrew Watson, to develop and exploit perfluorinated compounds as ocean tracers to study mixing processes in the ocean. Since then, a series of mulit-year experiments have been performed by Ledwell, Watson, and their colleagues in a variety of oceanic environments. Dr Ledwell, who moved to Woods Hole in 1990, has also developed and led a series of short-term mixing experiments in the upper ocean with fluorescent dyes. Dr Ledwell was a recipient of the Alexander Agassiz Award of the National Academy of Sciences in 2007, and was elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2011.

• Professor John Marshall, MIT, USA

Biography not yet available

• Professor Mike Meredith, British Antarctic Survey, UK

Biography

Michael Meredith leads the Polar Oceans strategic research programme at the British Antarctic Survey. Dr. Meredith is Chair of the Southern Ocean Observing System (SOOS), and serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI). Amongst other activities, he is a member of POGO (the Partnership for Observations of the Global Ocean), and an invited PI on the United States Palmer Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program. Following completion of his doctorate, he conducted physical oceanographic research at UEA, where he was awarded a NERC Fellowship. He has also previously worked at the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, Liverpool, where he led a project concerned with understanding the time-dependency of high-latitude ocean circulation. Dr. Meredith has worked in both Arctic and Antarctic regions, with particular expertise in understanding the role of the ocean in climate change and variability using combinations of direct measurements, remote sensing and numerical modelling. He has conducted numerous field campaigns in the polar regions, and has authored or co-authored more than 80 journal papers on the the imoprtance of these environments.

• Dr Stephen Rintoul, CSIRO and Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, Australia

Biography

Dr Stephen Rintoul is a physical oceanographer and climate scientist with a long-standing interest in the Southern Ocean and its role in the earth system. Born and educated in the USA, he has worked for the CSIRO in Australia since 1990. Primarily an observationalist, he uses a variety of tools to measure the Southern Ocean and has led a dozen oceanographic expeditions to the region. Dr Rintoul is a Coordinating Lead Author of the Oceans chapter in the 5^th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His scientific achievements have been recognised by a number of honours, including the Georg Wüst Prize of the German Society for Marine Research, the Martha T Muse Prize for Antarctic Science and Policy, the Australian Antarctic Medal, and election to the Australian Academy of Science.

• Professor Jorge Sarmiento, Princeton University, USA

Biography

Dr Jorge L Sarmiento is the George J Magee Professor of Geosciences and Geological Engineering at Princeton University.  He has published 177 papers on the global carbon cycle, on the use of chemical tracers to study ocean circulation, and on the impact of climate change on ocean biology and biogeochemistry.  He has participated in the scientific planning and execution of many of the large-scale multi-institutional and international oceanographic biogeochemical and tracer programs of the last three decades.  He was Director of Princeton's Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program from 1980 to 1990 and 2006 to the present, and is Director of the Cooperative Institute for Climate Science.  He has served on the editorial board of multiple journals and as editor of Global Biogeochemical Cycles.  He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Geophysical Union’s 2009 Roger Revelle Medalist.

• Dr Emily Shuckburgh, British Antarctic Survey, UK

Biography

Dr Emily Shuckburgh is a climate scientist and leads the Open Oceans research group at the British Antarctic Survey, which is focused on understanding the role of the polar oceans in the global climate system. She is also a fellow of Darwin College, a member of the Faculty of Mathematics, an associate of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research, an associate fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy and a member of Faculty for many programmes of the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, all at the University of Cambridge. In the past she has worked at Ecole Normal Superieure in Paris and at MIT. She is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and Chair of their Climate Science Communications Group, a trustee of the Campaign for Science and Engineering and a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. She acts as an advisor to the UK Government on behalf of the Natural Envrionment Research Council.

• Dr Kevin Speer, FSU, USA

Biography

Dr Speer has been a research scientist at the Institut für Meereskunde, Marine Physics Department, Kiel, Germany, a CNRS scientist with the Laboratoire de Physique des Océans, IFREMER, Brest, France, and became a Professor of Oceanography and Associate of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Institute, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL in 2003.

His research includes studies of the large-scale ocean circulation with hydrographic measurements, observations of turbulent mixing, laboratory experiments in geophysical fluid mechanics, and instrument development. He has authored or co-authored over 70 publications and 30 reports in this and related fields, and is co-Chair of the International CLIVAR/CliC/SCAR Southern Ocean Panel.

• Professor Andrew Watson FRS, University of East Anglia, UK

Biography not yet available

• Professor Darryn Waugh, John Hopkins University, USA

Biography

Darryn Waugh is a Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University.  His research interests are large-scale dynamics and transport in the atmosphere and oceans. A recent focus has been on determining / understanding the time scales for transport from the surface into the stratosphere and into the oceans, and the connection with stratospheric ozone depletion and oceanic uptake of carbon, respectively.  He has authored over 110 peer-reviewed articles and participated in several international assessments, including being lead chapter author of the 2006 WMO/UNEP ``Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion''.

Darryn Waugh was born in New Zealand, and obtained Bachelor and Masters degrees in Mathematics from the University of Waikato, NZ in 1985 and 1987, respectively.  He earned his PhD in Applied Mathematics at Cambridge University, UK in 1991. He was a post-doctoral fellow at MIT and a research scientist at Monash University, Australia, before joining the Hopkins faculty in 1998.       

Abstract

Surface westerly winds in the Southern Hemisphere have intensified over the past few decades, primarily in response to the formation of the Antarctic ozone hole, and there is debate on the impact of this on the ocean’s circulation and uptake and redistribution of atmospheric gases.  Here, we use oceanic measurements of CFC-12 made in the early 1990s and mid- to late-2000s to show large-scale coherent changes in the transport of surface waters into the interior (“ventilation”) of the southern oceans. In particular, there is a decrease in the age of subtropical subantarctic mode waters and an increase in the age of circumpolar deep waters. This suggests that the formation of the Antarctic ozone hole has caused large-scale coherent changes in the ventilation of the southern oceans.  Model simulations will be used to examine possible mechanisms involved with this connection, and possible changes in ventilation over this century.