BEM-VINDOS

Olá a todos!!!
Participem comigo nesta aventura, acompanhando o trabalho desenvolvido por uma equipa internacional de cientistas, a bordo do R/V Marion Dufresne, durante o cruzeiro oceanográfico MD168 - AMOCINT (IMAGES XVII) que decorrerá, no Atlântico Norte, entre 15 de Junho e 10 de Julho de 2008.

Estou a contar com os vossos comentários e questões!

Obrigado a todos pelo vosso apoio e colaboração...

Hélder Pereira
"Teachers at Sea"
Educational Program
Escola Secundária de Loulé
PORTUGAL

sábado, 5 de julho de 2008

Day 20 (04Jul)

Location: 65° 50' N - 4° 5' E
Weather: Sunny
Wind: 21 nds

Hello everyone!

We are in the last week of our journey, and we still have a large portion of the work of the mission to complete. We are currently in a critical site in the Vøring Plateau, where we have three coring sites and will take multiple cores of different types at each site. The weather is beautiful here off the coast of Norway, and the forecast for the time we will spend here looks very pleasant! The sea is calm and brilliant with the sunlight reflecting off of it. It is strange for most of us to have full sunlight throughout the night. This should make the 4-8am shift a bit easier for Catalina, Gertrud, and Hélder.

Sunbathing in the Artic

We will continue with some of the information that was presented in lectures during transit time (since we are resuming work we will not have more lectures until the next transit period). PhD student Charline Marzin presented a series of two talks about climate modeling. Climate modeling is absolutely necessary to understand what changes we might expect to see in our climate in the future, and also what implications these changes may have. Also, modeling allows us to identify factors that are not changing in the way we would expect.

Through identification of phenomena that are not well understood researchers can identify areas for future research.

When building a climate model, researchers must find a balance between the level of resolution of the model, the time extent of the model, and the computing time required to run the model. Climate conditions are affected by many factors, and are thus very complicated. The greatest source of uncertainty, however lies in future factors that we cannot predict, such as economic factors, emission levels, human population, etc.

In the second talk Charline focused on the findings of the most recent IPCC* report and her own research. This IPCC report found it to be very likely (In the past IPCC report it was just "likely") that recent rapid climate change is due to increased greenhouse gas (and especially CO2) emissions.

Charline working on a Calypso core

Charline is using climate modeling to better understand monsoons, and specifically what changes may take place in the monsoon cycle due to rapid climate change. PhD students Laure Resplandy and Stefano Bonelli also presented information about their modeling projects. Stefano works on coupled climate-ice sheet modeling, in order to simulate the topography of past major ice sheets in both Northern and Southern hemispheres. This implies consistency between the simulated climate and ice sheets, including the main feedbacks between these components.

Laure is modeling the distribution and transport patterns of areas of high productivity in the ocean at a high resolution. Her topic is particularly interesting because it involves both physics and biology.

Hearing all of these talks involving modeling gave us an idea of the importance of modeling and the breadth of the field.
Thank you again for following along on our journey!
Sincerely,

Catalina-Hélder-Gertrud-Jean-Angela-Carlo

* IPCC : Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

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