814337 Climate dynamics

Type
Lecture and exercise
Semester hours
2
Lecturer (assistant)
Rieder, Harald , Kuchar, Ales
Organisation
Offered in
Sommersemester 2024
Languages of instruction
Englisch
Content

Understanding the climate system and its changes requires familiarity with the basic laws driving its spatial structure and temporal evolution. This course will cover these topics by introducing the basics of atmospheric and climate dynamics and aims to put these in the context of climate change. It introduces fundamental concepts of fluid dynamics and their application to study motions in the atmosphere and global oceans that govern the succession of weather patterns and determine regional climates. In the first part of the course, different simplified equations and scaling laws will be derived from the governing equations of atmospheric motions and from energy and mass conservation. Typical solutions that can be readily identified, such as Rossby or gravity waves, will be derived. The second part of the lecture will introduce the main modes of climate variability and discuss their atmospheric and surface impacts, the dynamics behind the modes, and methods of characterization. The course will expand to regional climate impacts tele-connected to preferred modes of variability (i.e. El Niño-Southern Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, Southern Annual Mode, etc.) and provide an overview about future projections.
Objective (expected results of study and acquired competences)

After the course the students will be able to recognize the most common climate and large-scale atmospheric phenomena and characterize them from observational and model output data. They will understand the typical laws governing large-scale atmospheric motions which will allow them to apply these for the characterization of atmospheric and climate phenomena across temporal and spatial scales. They will be able to use the results derived in this lecture to quantify climate phenomena and their spatial and temporal evolution and related impacts on regional scale.
You can find more details like the schedule or information about exams on the course-page in BOKUonline.