Coupled Atmosphere-Ocean Dynamics of Climate Variability and Climate Change presents the patterns, mechanisms, and predictability of climate variability and anthropogenic climate change. Based on a graduate course the author has taught over 25 years, this book provides the physical foundation for those who are interested in fundamental questions such as: why climate varies from one year to another; how predictable climate is; and how climate will change in the face of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This is the first comprehensive and systematic treatment of this subject that simultaneously draws on the latest research and is accessible for graduate students.
The book takes a step-by-step systematic approach to coupled ocean-atmosphere interactions. This allows a wide range of comparative views: climate modes among and across different tropical ocean basins, ocean feedback on the atmosphere (in and out of the tropics), and spontaneous internal oscillation versus externally forced climate change. Such comparative views offer unprecedented insight into the dynamics of climate variability and predictability. This book can be used as supplementary reading for advanced undergraduate students, as coursework in climate dynamics, modeling, variability, and change, and as a reference book and research monograph for researchers in ocean, atmospheric, climate, and earth system sciences.
Table of Contents
Preface1. Introduction
2. Energy balance and transport
3. Tropical convection and planetary-scale circulation
4. The Madden-Julian Oscillation
5. Summer monsoons
6. Subtropical climate: Trade winds and low clouds
7. Equatorial Oceanography
8. Coupled feedbacks and tropical climatology
9. El Ni?o, the Southern Oscillation, and the global influence
10. Tropical Atlantic Variability
11. Indian Ocean variability
12. Extratropical variability and the influence on the tropics
13. Global warming: Thermodynamic effects
14. Regional climate change
Epilogue
