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Reduced Descriptions of Coupled GFD Systems (Slow manifolds in the ocean and atmosphere)

IMA Workshop

February 11-15, 2002

Minneapolis, MN, USA

Mathematics

Host: Institute for Mathematics and its Applications
Homepage: http://www.ima.umn.edu/geoscience/winter/g6.html
Email: staff@ima.umn.edu

Organizers: D. Holm, J. McWilliams

Description:
A distinctive difficulty in climate-system modeling, analysis and prediction is the presence of two or more time scales in the problem. The atmosphere and oceans each support slow Rossby and fast inertia-gravity waves, while the characteristic times of atmosphere, oceans, and ice sheets are about a factor of 10 apart. Thus the proper treatment, via slaved-variable and slow-manifold theory of time-scale disparity within each subsystem and between subsystems is of the essence. The workshop topics will include

(i) the connection between the slow manifold, averaged descriptions, the quasi-geostrophic approximation, and intermediate balanced models;

(ii) models of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system;

(iii) coupling between the wind-driven and thermohaline ocean circulation; and

(iv) slow-manifold theory. Tools such as asymptotics, averaging, center manifold, inertial manifold, attractors and their approximations are indispensable for dealing with these problems.

Keywords: coupling, ENSO, intermediate models

Date received: January 31, 2001


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