Abstract: 

The Subarctic-Arctic Research Interest League (SAIL) consists of more than 20 postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates from multiple institutions. With the support of Prof. Lixin Wu, they have collaborated with scholars such as Prof. Gerrit Lohmann, Prof. Wenju Cai, and Prof. Deliang Chen and organized the Climate-Biology Working Group (CBL) to carry out multidisciplinary cross-disciplinary collaborative research. SAIL members have published nearly 20 research papers in top journals such as PRL, GRL, ERL, JPO, and JGR. 

High-resolution climate models can resolve more climate variability, including ocean eddies and climate extremes, and are therefore of great significance for studying climate variability across different scales and their interactions. SAIL's main research direction is the climate and ecological relevance of (sub)mesoscale processes and extreme events in the polar oceans. SAIL is recruiting graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in conjunction with the AWI at Germany. 

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is an important part of the global thermohaline circulation. Its collapse has a catastrophic impact on the climate, and there are many discussions about its future climate tipping point. We found that although the AMOC in both the high-resolution and low-resolution climate models weakens by a similar extent at the basin scale, there are abrupt shifts at the regional scale, such as the strengthening towards the Arctic. This is due to that the density at the ocean boundary has stronger variability with the resolved eddies. This study emphasizes that the AMOC has disproportionate and interconnected cross-scale climate tipping points in the high-resolution model.

Marine extremes are destructive to ecosystems and have received widespread attention. We found that the Arctic marine heatwaves resolved by the high-resolution model would cause stronger future Arctic ocean warming than currently expected, indicating the feedback from extremes on the climate. The cold spells in the Southern Ocean in the high-resolution model would strengthen in the future. This is because the resolved eddies tend to strengthen its northward movement, carrying high-latitude cold water to cause cold spells.

Biography:

Ruijian Gou is a PhD student from Ocean University of China and a visiting student at Alfred Wegener Institute and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He is leading a research interest group (SAIL, WeChat official account: SAIL 北极) in studying the climate and ecology relevance of Arctic ocean extremes and eddies. He authors publications on PRL, GRL, ERL, JPO, JGR and was nominated for the Youth May Fourth Medal by Ocean University of China.

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