Nicholas Herold

PhD Candidiate

Madsen Building (F09), Room 415
Phone: +61 2 9351 4257
Fax: +61 2 9036 6588
Email:

Supervisors
Assoc. Prof Dietmar Müller
Dr John You

PhD Title: Trends and quantification of processes contributing to two major Cenozoic warming events.

Nicholas' research focuses on global warming events of the deep past and quantifying the processes which contributed to these events. More specifically, his PhD project focuses on the Miocene Climatic Optimum (MCO) which took place ~15 Ma. Prediction of future global warming is limited by our ability to model and quantify past global warming events, therefore it is important that discrepancies between proxy data and climate models be resolved. One of the major issues that have faced the palaeoclimate modelling community for more than a decade is the low equator-pole temperature gradient observed for past “hot house” climates. While some of this has been attributed to bias in the observations of paleo sea-surface temperatures, this does not account for the entire discrepancy between coupled model output and observations - climate models have still been unable to replicate suitably low temperature gradients. For the Miocene specifically, quantifying and producing the equator to pole temperature gradient implied by geological data has not been done in a coupled model framework.


This research will carry out coupled model simulation of the Miocene Climatic Optimum (MCO), the warmest interval in Earth’s history over the past 35 Myrs. The MCO is an ideal analogue to current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecasts of global warming for the end of the 21st century and provides a proxy-validated template for which to test further perturbations to climate. It is the aim of this research to provide a better understanding of the global warming mechanisms active during the MCO through quantification of land, ocean, atmosphere and orbital effects and to accurately (within the margin of error?) simulate the equator-pole temperature gradient of the MCO.