Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - January/February 2013 - (Page 6)

in my own words Eyes on the Atmosphere Kevin TrenberTh, PhD Distinguished Senior Scientist national Center for Atmospheric research, Climate Analysis Section Kevin Trenberth has led an extraordinarily active and distinguished career as an atmospheric scientist. He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Geophysical Union, and an Honorary Fellow of the New Zealand Royal Society. Dr. Trenberth has served as lead author and a coordinating lead author for three Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientific assessments, and, as a member of the IPCC, shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In addition, he has served on the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and chaired the WCRP Observation and Assimilation Panel. He now chairs the Global Energy and Water Exchanges Program scientific steering group. The senior scientist as a young man I grew up in New Zealand and went to college at University of Canterbury in Christchurch. I did a math honors degree, which focused on applied mathematics and included courses in quantum mechanics, relativity, mechanics, and fluid dynamics. Rather than an interest in weather, it was an interest in understanding how fluids work—and in particular the atmosphere, which is a fluid—that led me into meteorology. After I finished my degree, I joined the New Zealand Meteorological Service and won a research fellowship to study in the United States. The condition was that for every year I was away, I had to work in the Meteorological Service for a year. So I returned after earning my PhD at MIT, but then came back to the U.S. to work as an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I had been planning just to take a sabbatical but instead ended up leaving to work at NCAR [the National Center for Atmospheric Research]. Patterns and variations By the time I came to NCAR, I had already written some of the very early papers on the El Niño phenomenon, a climate pattern in which changes in the ocean subsequently influence patterns in the atmosphere. It turns out that El Niño is a very important factor in New Zealand’s weather and its variability from one year to the next. When I came to NCAR, I worked on a program to help develop a national and then international program to predict the El Niño phenomenon. This program was called TOGA (Tropical Oceans Global Atmosphere), and its goal was to track and predict global climate phenomenon on the scale of months to years. My work eventually became broader, encompassing not just El Niño but other patterns related to interannual climate variations, including droughts and floods, related to irregular changes in ocean-atmosphere interactions. Natural variability, intensified In 1988, Jim Hansen [head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies] went before Congress and testified that the very hot weather and drought in the Midwest that year, which caused about $40 billion in damage, was a result of global warming. The same year, a couple of colleagues and I published a paper in Science that said this weather was really more related to the La Niña pattern that occurred at the time: fairly cool conditions changed the heating patterns in the atmosphere and set up a wave pattern that in this case favored this drought across the United States. It was a fairly unique circumstance. But Hansen’s testimony did raise the question in my mind of what role global warming was playing in the drought. Subsequently, we have come to understand that while drought itself tends to be caused by a natural variability, the intensity of the drought is related to global warming. The drought lasts longer. It is more severe. Heat waves and an increased risk of wildfires go along with that. 6 imagine Jan/Feb 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - January/February 2013

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - January/February 2013
Contents
Big Picture
In My Own Words
The Week I Turned Green
No Turning Back
Landsat: A Continuing Legacy of Earth Observation
Sensing Danger
The Black Gold Miners
Cleaner Water, Brought to You by Sunlight and Science
Journey to the Frozen Continent
CTY Paleobiology
Selected Opportunities & Resources
Innovation in the Real World
Off the Shelf
Word Wise
Exploring Career Options
One Step Ahead
Planning Ahead for College
Students Review
Creative Minds Imagine
Mark Your Calendar
Knossos Games

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - January/February 2013