TMWYF: Using Climate Models to Understand Stratosphere-Troposphere Interaction (Jessie Oehrlein)

Earth's atmosphere is a multiscale, coupled, nonlinear system. We care about everything from clouds here and now to global temperature in 2100. The state of the atmosphere depends on ocean, land, and ice conditions as well as external factors like emissions. Nonlinearity means that information from initial conditions is near-useless after two weeks. And the atmosphere is really hard to do experiments on.

It's great.

I'll talk briefly about how different kinds of weather and climate models capture various temporal and spatial scales, with predictability coming from different sources. Then I'll focus on the bottom two layers of the atmosphere, the troposphere and the stratosphere: how they interact, why their interaction affects our winter climate, and how we use models to answer our questions about them.

Background required: Anyone who is comfortable with a partial derivative is definitely fine, and knowing what "linear" means is helpful. But I'll explain everything with what it means physically!