Announcing a seminar series on Earth System Science, Climate Variability
and Seasonality on Wed. 23 October at 15h00
A discussion group is being planned to study the implications of seasonality for climate change and climate variability. This topic has been chosen because seasonality is something we can readily measure in one way or another (e.g. temperature, rainfall), and it can also be discerned and examined in the geological or fossil record. It is also an important component of climate change modelling – if we don’t get seasonality right, we must be missing some important component of the climate system.
The plan is to host a series of provocative seminars, linked by video conferencing in a number of venues around South Africa (and beyond) and open to a wide group, followed by a smaller group discussion on how to take this approach forward.
The first seminar in this series will be given by Dr Natalie Burls (ex-UCT and currently a post-doc at Yale University in the US).
Was El Niño once a norm, rather than a perturbation?
Natalie has some very interesting modeling results that determine under what conditions El Niño can be a permanent rather than a transient phenomenon. The results are relevant to the Langebaan fossils because there are indications that at that time some 5 million years ago, the waters off the west coast of southern Africa were as warm as those off the eastern coast.
Around the globe, all the tropical and subtropical upwelling zones were absent. Swakopmund had the climate of Durban today! Rather than mainly winter rains, Cape Town had rains throughout the year! The seasonal cycle then was different from what it is today.
- Do we have information about conditions elsewhere in southern Africa at that time?
- What further observational studies and computer calculations do we need to explore these tantalizing but tentative results?
The talk will be offered via Video Conferencing at the following venues:
- UCT Oceanography (in the flesh)
- WITS (venue to be announced)
- Pretoria (venue to be announced)
- Durban (venue to be announced)
- Grahamstown (Venue to be announced)