Climate modeling                                                                                               

This project builds on on-going climate-modeling experiments that use NCAR’s Climate System Model (CCSM3) to study the sensitivities of the Arctic system to volcanism and solar variability. A new data-model comparison will test whether the most prominent changes in the Arctic system during the past 8000 years, as reconstructed from the proxy records, can be explained by a plausible combination of system-component conditions coincident with prolonged volcanism. The experiments, conducted with NCAR collaborators, will focus on the elements of the Arctic system that participate in abrupt transitions, and that might elicit nonlinear changes in the future.