The Centre for Computational Mathematics is hosting a public lecture and reception to celebrate the 10th anniversary.
Everyone welcome! Please register to attend.
Public lecture: Ocean turbulence and global climate variability in the ice-age
Speaker: Professor Dick Peltier, University of Toronto
Abstract: That high performance computation (HPC) has become indispensable to scientific advance in a wide range of fields is evident. In climate research it is especially the case that progress tracks technology. Among the most challenging problems are those which involve multi-scale phenomenology. As an example I will discuss the recent success in explaining, through the application of HPC, the so-called Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillation of ice-age climate variability. This millennium-timescale behavior is shown to be a consequence of a nonlinear “relaxation oscillation” of the strength of the global overturning circulation of the oceans. Its existence is highly sensitive to the action of small scale ocean turbulence which effects an irreversible vertical flux of mass that enables abyssal water to return to the surface.