The African Climate & Development Initiative and the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia invite you to a webinar entitled: The Southern Ocean in the Atlantic and Indian ocean sectors: current knowledge gaps and the role of sea ice. The webinar will be hosted by Associate Prof. Marcello Vichi, oceanographer and climate scientist of the University of Cape Town. Prof Vichi is the Director of UCT’ Marine Institute (Ma-Re). This webinar is part of the Newton-funded PhD exchange programme between UEA and UCT. The webinar is aimed at post-graduate students and researchers working with climate and/or Earth System models.

The Southern Ocean is one major buffer for anthropogenic heat and carbon. It is a mediator of the exchange of heat and momentum between the atmosphere and the ocean and its large seasonal variation is modulated by the large seasonality of the sea ice cover. In March and April 2017 the extent of Antarctic sea ice reached the lowest minima in the existing records, raising concerns on the anticipated response to anthropogenic warming. Major biases in numerical climate models are due to misrepresented sea-ice features, which affect the predictions of precipitation in southern hemisphere continents, the location of mid-latitude storm belts and the seasonality of carbon fluxes and phytoplankton blooms. This webinar will explore the current biases of climate and Earth System Models in the Southern Ocean with a future perspective on the data that are required to improve the future projections.

Please register for the webinar here: http://bit.ly/2qPP9O6

Join the webinar by choosing the guest option on our platform: http://meeting.uct.ac.za/r9n0yhm92i3/

More Information: Eve Wicksteed: eve.wicksteed@uct.ac.za