Climate Applications of Layering

Workshop theme

Predictions of how the Earth’s climate might evolve rely on numerical simulations of the atmosphere coupled to numerical simulations of the ocean. Because these simulations model the entire globe and must be run for decades, if not centuries, they are necessarily run at relatively coarse resolution in order to get results in a reasonable length of time. Consequently, while the models are able to capture the large-scale flows, referred to as the “general circulation”, they cannot resolve small scale processes as occur in naturally evolving layers. Broadly speaking, layers in the atmosphere and ocean are manifest in one of two dynamically distinct forms: primarily vertically stacked layers separated by rapid density variations and primarily horizontal layers separated by strong shear flows. Examples of interfaces separating density layers include atmospheric inversions where the temperature abruptly increases with height a few hundred meters above the ground, and the pycnocline which separates warmer and fresher surface ocean water from colder and more saline water at depth. Horizontal shear flows are manifest as storm fronts in the atmosphere and, in the ocean for example, act to separate the fast moving Gulf Stream from the wider Atlantic Ocean. An extraterrestrial example is the meridionally alternating eastward and westward winds on Jupiter. The existence of density interfaces and fronts act as a barrier to transport, which can be harmful or beneficial. Atmospheric inversions can trap pollution close to the ground, inhibitng its dispersion until morningtime convection erodes the interface. The stratospheric polar vortex above Antarctica inhibits dispersion of CFCs during the southern spring resulting in the formation of the ozone hole. By contrast, the polar vortex over the Arctic is more rapidly broken up by atmospheric waves created by flow over the underlying mountain ranges. So the ozone hole is not so pronounced in the northern hemisphere. In the ocean, our present climate relies upon the transport of heat and carbon dioxide absorbed at the surface being carried to depth by wintertime convection. A grave concern is that increased glacier melt, particularly in the Labrador Sea, will introduce so much fresh water on the surface as to create a pycnocline with such a strong density contrast that convection cannot penetrate through it, so trapping heat and greenhouse gases near the surface.Our workshop on Climate Applications of Layering will bring together specialists in theory, numerical modelling, laboratory experiments and observations to address questions including how do layers and interfaces form in various settings, what factors control the strength of the interface between layers, what factors result in the erosion of the interface, and how strong must an interface be to resist being eroded?

Applications for this workshop are now closed

Fees

Registration Only

Registration Package: £219
Student Registration Package: £169

The Registration Package includes admission to all seminars, lunches and refreshments on the days that lectures take place (Monday - Friday), wine reception and formal dinner, but does not include other meals or accommodation.

Virtual Registration

Virtual Registration Package: £0

Virtual registration is free, and includes virtual admission to all seminars and does not include physical attendance, meals or accommodation.

Formal Dinner Only

Formal Dinner: £60

Participants on the Registration Package, including organisers and speakers, are automatically included in this event. For all remaining participants who would like to attend, such as programme participants, the above charge will apply.

Accommodation

Unfortunately we do not have any accommodation to offer so all successful applicants will need to source their own accommodation.

Limited funding support for accommodation may be available. To request this, please select the "accommodation package" in your application.

Local hotels and accommodation services:

The Institute accepts no responsibility for these services.

Meals

Lunch

Lunch will be served at Churchill College. Attendees will be provided with lunch vouchers for 2 courses and 1 drink. Timings will be confirmed with the timetable.

Evening Meal

Participants are free to make their own arrangements for dinner.

Formal Dinner

The Formal Dinner will be held at Selwyn College on Wednesday 22nd May at 19:30.

Selwyn College was founded in 1882, and boasts beautiful landscaped gardens. The event is a tradition for INI participants and gives you a chance to socialise with your colleagues on a more personal level. It is not one to miss!

Participants on the Registration Package, including organisers and speakers, are automatically included in this event.

The Institute kindly requests that any papers published as a result of this programme’s activities are credited as such. Please acknowledge the support of the Institute in your paper using the following text:

The author(s) would like to thank the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, for support and hospitality during the programme Climate Applications of Layering, where work on this paper was undertaken. This work was supported by EPSRC grant EP/R014604/1.

Timetable

Monday 20th May 2024
09:15 to 09:45	Registration and morning coffee	No Room Required
09:45 to 10:00	Milla Kibble Aalborg Universitet Director's and Organiser's Welcome	No Room Required
10:00 to 11:00	Mara Freilich Brown University Chair: Mary-Louise Timmermans Inhomogeneous mixing of ocean tracers at fronts: Implications for energy fluxes and biogeochemistry	Room 1
11:00 to 11:30	Morning Coffee	No Room Required
11:30 to 12:00	Peter Haynes University of Cambridge Chair: Mary-Louise Timmermans Beta-plane jet variability: mechanisms and relevance to atmosphere and ocean	Room 1
12:00 to 12:30	Nicole Shibley Princeton University Chair: Mary-Louise Timmermans Arctic Transitions: The Beaufort Gyre’s Diffusive Staircase	Room 1
12:30 to 14:00	Lunch at Churchill College	No Room Required
14:00 to 15:00	Laura Cope University of Leeds Chair: Peter Read Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in Beta-Plane Turbulence	Room 1
15:00 to 15:30	David Dritschel University of St Andrews Chair: Peter Read Jet dynamics in topographically-forced shallow-water planetary atmospheres	Room 1
15:30 to 16:00	Afternoon Tea	No Room Required
16:00 to 17:00	Flash Introductions	Room 1
17:00 to 18:00	Welcome Wine Reception	No Room Required

Tuesday 21st May 2024
10:00 to 11:00	Peter Read University of Oxford Chair: Leif Thomas Measuring and characterising inhomogeneous, anisotropic turbulent cascades and jet formation from observations of Jupiter and Saturn	Room 1
11:00 to 11:30	Group Photo and Morning Coffee	No Room Required
11:30 to 12:00	Kasturi Shah University of Cambridge Chair: Leif Thomas Layering in strongly stratified geophysical and astrophysical turbulence (with Chini, Garaud, Caulfield, Cope)	Room 1
12:00 to 12:30	Lois Baker University of Edinburgh Chair: Leif Thomas Topographic upwelling of Antarctic Bottom Water in the presence of deep stratified interfaces	Room 1
12:30 to 14:00	Lunch at Churchill College	No Room Required
14:00 to 15:00	Daphné Lemasquerier University of St Andrews Chair: Elizabeth Yankovsky Zonostrophic turbulence on gas giants: insights on turbulent transport and mixing from laboratory experiments	Room 1
15:00 to 15:30	Michael LeBars CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) Chair: Elizabeth Yankovsky Instabilities and layering around floating vortices in rotating stratified fluids	Room 1
15:30 to 16:00	Afternoon Tea	No Room Required
16:00 to 16:30	Justin Brown Naval Postgraduate School Chair: Elizabeth Yankovsky Thermohaline Staircases and Shear: Formation and Disruption Mechanisms	Room 1

Wednesday 22nd May 2024
10:00 to 11:00	Dick Peltier University of Toronto Chair: Bruce Sutherland Diffusive Convection Staircases in the Modern Arctic and Ice-Age North Atlantic Oceans: Key to the Physics of the Dansgaard-Oeschger Climate Oscillation	Room 1
11:00 to 11:30	Morning Coffee	No Room Required
11:30 to 12:00	Stephanie Waterman University of British Columbia Chair: Bruce Sutherland What is the role of staircase and staircase-like structures in setting heat and buoyancy fluxes from the Atlantic Water layer on a pan-Arctic scale?	Room 1
12:00 to 12:30	Adrian Barker University of Leeds Chair: Bruce Sutherland Tidal dissipation in stably stratified and layered regions of rotating giant planets	Room 1
12:30 to 14:00	Lunch at Churchill College	No Room Required
14:00 to 18:00	Free Afternoon	No Room Required
19:30 to 22:00	Formal Dinner at Selwyn College	No Room Required

Thursday 23rd May 2024
10:00 to 11:00	Elizabeth Yankovsky New York University Chair: Alexis Kaminski Links Between Eddy Horizontal and Vertical Structure: A Geostrophic Turbulence Interpretation	Room 1
11:00 to 11:30	Morning Coffee	No Room Required
11:30 to 12:00	Chris Howland Universiteit Twente Chair: Alexis Kaminski Recent developments in stratified turbulence	Room 1
12:00 to 12:30	Steven Tobias University of Leeds Chair: Alexis Kaminski Understanding fluid dynamics for climate using reduced models	Room 1
12:30 to 14:00	Lunch at Churchill College	No Room Required
14:00 to 15:00	Leif Thomas Stanford University Chair: Lois Baker Horizontal staircase formation in ocean fronts via symmetric instability-- a transport barrier or blender?	Room 1
15:00 to 15:30	Claudia Cenedese Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Chair: Lois Baker How Dirty Icebergs Melt	Room 1
15:30 to 16:00	Afternoon Tea	No Room Required
16:00 to 16:30	John Taylor University of Cambridge Chair: Lois Baker Sorting out the steps: diagnosing layer formation in stratified turbulence and diffusive convection using sorted buoyancy coordinates	Room 1

Friday 24th May 2024
10:00 to 11:00	Alexis Kaminski University of California, Berkeley Chair: Laura Cope Estimating efficiency and lengthscales of stratified mixing events from limited measurements	Room 1
11:00 to 11:30	Morning Coffee	No Room Required
11:30 to 12:30	Discussion	Room 1
12:30 to 14:00	Lunch at Churchill College	No Room Required

Anti-diffusive dynamics: from sub-cellular to astrophysical scales

Organisers

Bruce Sutherland University of Alberta
Mary-Louise Timmermans Yale University

Speakers

Lois Baker University of Edinburgh
Adrian Barker University of Leeds
Justin Brown Naval Postgraduate School
Claudia Cenedese Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Laura Cope University of Leeds
David Dritschel University of St Andrews
Mara Freilich Brown University
Peter Haynes University of Cambridge
Chris Howland Universiteit Twente
Alexis Kaminski University of California, Berkeley
Milla Kibble Aalborg Universitet
Michael LeBars CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique)
Daphné Lemasquerier University of St Andrews
Dick Peltier University of Toronto
Peter Read University of Oxford
Kasturi Shah University of Cambridge
Nicole Shibley Princeton University
John Taylor University of Cambridge
Leif Thomas Stanford University
Steven Tobias University of Leeds
Stephanie Waterman University of British Columbia
Elizabeth Yankovsky New York University

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Participants

Lois Baker University of Edinburgh
Alexander Balk University of Utah
Neil Balmforth University of British Columbia
Adrian Barker University of Leeds
Samuel Boury Université Paris Saclay
Daniel Boutros University of Cambridge
Justin Brown Naval Postgraduate School
Mingyun Cao University of California, San Diego
Mike Cates University of Cambridge
Claudia Cenedese Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Shuchi Chaki University of Dhaka
Veronika Charpy University of Leeds
Laura Cope University of Leeds
Matthew Crowe Newcastle University
Vassilios Dallas University of Oxford
Peter Davidson University of Cambridge
Patrick Diamond University of California, San Diego
Guilhem Dif-Pradalier CEA, Cadarache
Shanshan Ding University of Oxford
David Dritschel University of St Andrews
Carolina Dufour McGill University
Tom Eaves University of Dundee
Marianne Freiberger University of Cambridge; Plus Magazine
Mara Freilich Brown University
Amrapalli Garanaik Oregon State University
John Gibbon Imperial College London
Luke Gostelow University of Leeds
Stephen Griffiths University of Leeds
John Guthrie University of Washington
Andrew Hamilton University of Alberta
Peter Haynes University of Cambridge
Corentin Herbert ENS - Lyon
Jamie Hilditch Stanford University
Kumiko Hori National Institute for Fusion Science
Chris Howland Universiteit Twente
David Hughes University of Leeds
Ted Johnson University College London
Alexis Kaminski University of California, Berkeley
Rich Kerswell University of Cambridge
Yoshifumi Kimura Nagoya University
Edgar Knobloch University of California, Berkeley
Quentin Kriaa Universiteit Twente
Henrik Latter University of Cambridge
Matthew Lawrence University of Leeds
Michael LeBars CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique)
Daphné Lemasquerier University of St Andrews
Anthony Leonard CALTECH (California Institute of Technology)
Tianshu Liu University of Cambridge
Zhiyu Liu None / Other
Matt Lobo Princeton University
Biswajit Maji Indian Institute of Science
Leo Middleton Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Alexander Milovanov ENEA C.R. Frascati; Max-Planck-Institut für Physik komplexer Systeme, Dresden
Keith Moffatt University of Cambridge
Yann Munschy CEA, Cadarache
Sergey Myagkov Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences
Cesare Nardini SPEC, CEA-Saclay; Sorbonne Université
Rhiannon Nicholls University of Leeds
Gordon Ogilvie University of Cambridge
Rahul Pandit Indian Institute of Science
Olivier Panico CNRS & École polytechnique; CEA, Cadarache
Brodie Pearson Oregon State University
Timothy J Pedley University of Cambridge
Dick Peltier University of Toronto
Michael Proctor University of Cambridge
Paul Pružina Isaac Newton Institute; University of Cambridge
S Ravichandran Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Peter Read University of Oxford
Kasturi Shah University of Cambridge
Nicole Shibley Princeton University
Ira Shokar University of Cambridge
Bruce Sutherland University of Alberta
John Taylor University of Cambridge
Ritabrata Thakur Indian Institute of Technology
Uwe Thiele Universität Münster
Leif Thomas Stanford University
Mary-Louise Timmermans Yale University
Steven Tobias University of Leeds
Matt Vine University of Leeds
Catherine Vreugdenhil University of Melbourne
Stephanie Waterman University of British Columbia
Yue Wu University of Michigan
Adam Yang Yale University
Elizabeth Yankovsky New York University
Qi Zhou University of Calgary