Atmosphere Ocean Science Colloquium

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Could Volcanoes Freeze Oceans?

Speaker: Georgiy Stenchikov, KAUST

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Wednesday, October 16, 2013, 3:30 p.m.

Synopsis:

It was long suspected that extremely strong volcanic eruptions could be a cause of ice ages. However this was never reproduced in the models. Recently it was shown that volcanic forcing causes long lasting signals in the deep ocean and offsets about 1/3 of ocean heating associated with global warming. It was realized that volcanic impacts could help to estimate climate sensitivity and provide, although incomplete, useful natural analogy to the most feasible climate engineering scheme, so called, stratospheric solar radiation management (SRM). It was also found that assumptions about past and future volcanic activity could significantly affect climate predictions. In my talk I will discuss some of the above issues using simulations with sporadic and periodic volcanic forcing.