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Workshop 3 (March 4th 2000) - "Winds, Currents and Cores"
Old Technology to New:
Assembling a 100-Year Record of Ocean Winds from
Ships and Satellites
The recently launched QuikSCAT satellite scatterometer (NASA) is returning
high-quality data that will be used by oceanographers and atmospheric scientists
to study winds over the ocean on a wide variety of time scales. From a climate
perspective, one of the most exciting applications of this technology is that
statistical analysis of short records of satellite data can be used to improve
estimates of wind variability on long time scales (e.g., decades to a century).
On these longer time scales, the wind record from ships at sea is spatially and
temporally filled with gaps and subject to larger errors. Several of us at LDEO are using
satellite wind observations to better understand deficiencies in the historical
data sets and to develop new wind climatologies for the historical period. My
presentation will describe this work, and discuss its use for assessing climate
change during the past century. The specific topics which will be covered in the
presentation include: 1) the technological aspects of measuring winds from
space; 2) using these measurements to understand recent wind variations, and 3)
using these measurements to understand wind variations on climatologically
significant time scales and for times prior to the launch of wind-observing
satellites.
- Instructor:
- Dr. Donna Witter is an Associate Research Scientist at LDEO.
Her research uses remote sensing data, in combination with in-water
observations and numerical ocean models to assess climate variability on
space and time scale of interest for climate change. She has been
involved as a key researcher on several NASA JPL satellite investigations.
Visit to the LDEO Deep-Sea Sample Collection
- The Lamont-Doherty Deep-Sea Sample Repository collection of sediment
samples provides material for scientists worldwide to research many facets
of our earth's systems. Deep-sea cores contain microfossils and minerals
that can be used as environmental indicators, or reveal climate change. The
cores hold a permanent record of geological events such as earthquakes,
changing sea levels and shorelines, and the earth's magnetic history.
Variations of color and texture resulting from changes over time in the
sediment are clearly visible in the cores. Samples from the different
intervals can be easily processed for observation of the variations in
number or kinds of microfossils or minerals. The dynamics and significance
of these changes will be explored in the workshop.
- Instructor:
- Rusty Lotti Bond, Curator of the Lamont-Doherty Deep-Sea Sample
Repository, oversees the collection, processing, archiving and physical properties
analyses of the largest collection of material from the ocean
floor.
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