Program uses Singapore Time and is 8 hours ahead of GMT

OS Distinguished Lecture/Live Q&A Thu-04 Aug 12:45 – 13:30

Circulation and Climate Variability in the Extratropical North Pacific Ocean

In this talk, I will review interannual-to-decadal variability observed in the major current systems in the extratropical North Pacific Ocean that include the North Equatorial Current, the Subtropical Countercurrent (STCC), and the Kuroshio/Kuroshio Extension. Advancement in satellite remote-sensing technology, global in-situ measurement programs like Argo, and high-resolution numerical simulations have significantly improved our capabilities to capture and unravel the ocean circulation variability. Rather than treating the individual current system and their variability as independent features, I will focus on their commonality and their inter-connectivity. In addition to the forced variability by the atmosphere, I will further stress the role and feedback by the decadal Kuroshio Extension variability on the overlying atmosphere. The overall message is that there is a need to explore and comprehend the extratropical North Pacific ocean-atmosphere variability as an integrated climate system.

Dr. Bo QIU is a Professor at the Department of Oceanography, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Prof. Qiu received his BS, MS and D.Sc. in Physical Oceanography from Kyoto University (1984, 1986 and 1990 respectively). His scientific interests include large-scale ocean circulation variability, mid-latitude air-sea interaction, geophysical fluid dynamics, and ocean’s role in climate variability. He has published more than 180 papers in peer-reviewed journals and was a contributing author to both IPCC 4th and 5th Assessment Reports. Prof. Qiu is recipients of the Okada Prize from the Oceanographic Society of Japan (1993), the New Investigators Award from NASA’s Mission to Planetary Earth (1996), the University of Hawaii Board of Regents' Medal for Excellence in Research (2018), the Japan Oceanographic Society Prize (2019), and the Henry Stommel Research Medal from the American Meteorological Society (2021). He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. He serves currently as an editor of Geophysical Research Letters of AGU.