Jordis  Hansen

Research Interest

Under increasing climate change, the surface water in the tropical Pacific has experienced cooling in the East and warming in the West. There are many processes in the atmosphere and ocean that influence the behaviour of this temperature gradient, and currently the observed cooling in the South-Eastern Pacific is not represented in all climate models.

In my work for the group “Large-scale Coupled Dynamics” I am interested in understanding the physical processes differentiating the models w. r. t. their response in the Pacific sea surface temperature. Using abrupt four times CO2 forcing experiments, I compare the fast response in the tropical Pacific in the MPI-ESM and MIROC, two models which exemplify both the existence and lack of East-Pacific cooling.