Judith Tong, BE(Civil & Environmental) (Hons)/BSc

Geosciences Demountables (H11), Rm 142
Phone: +61 2 9351 4257
Fax: +61 2 9036 6588
Email:

Supervisor
Dr John You

Associate Supervisor
Assoc. Prof. Dietmar Müller

Ph D title: Title: Modelling of the Energy Balance in the Ocean for Addressing Climate Change

It is the endeavour of this PhD to understand the role of the oceans in influencing our climate. The research will be conducted in two parts:

1. Modelling of the current energy balance/budget of the ocean, specifically thermal and mechanical energy, with comparison to geological past and future climate using the coupled climate model CCSM3.0.
2. Modelling of meso-scale ocean processes (spatial scale of a few km to 100km) for direct calculation of the energy source and its transformation in aid of parameterisation for global circulation models (gcms).

An understanding of the energy balance of the ocean can provide insight into the driving forcings of climate change for the past, present and future. It needs to be distinguished as to how natural and anthropogenic forcings individually induce climate change and most importantly on what time-scale do their impacts take effect. The current energy imbalance is confirmed by observations of increasing ocean heat content. Futhermore, meso-scale processes and mixing in the ocean have a significant influence on climate, hence their inclusion in coupled global ocean/atmosphere climate models is extremely important. With better parameterisation, it is hoped that the predictive capability of climate models can be improved.