Sabrina SPEICH
Research
Research project in focus:
WHIRLS is an ERC Synergy project about small-scale ocean processes having large-scale impacts. Heat and carbon are the currencies of regional and global climate, constantly exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere. This exchange is strongly influenced by fine-scales ocean eddies—whirls—that flux heat and carbon towards, or away from, the air-sea interface. The overarching goal of WHIRLS is to improve our understanding and modelling of the ocean’s fine-scale dynamics and how they steer ocean-atmosphere interactions and upper-ocean biogeochemistry and biology.
ObsSea4Clim is a Horizon Europe project funded under the call
"Closing the research gaps on Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) in support of global assessments" / TOPIC ID: HORIZON-CL6-2023-CLIMATE-01-8 with the following goal: Improving the monitoring, understanding, reporting (Essential Variables) and projections of essential physical oceanic processes related to climate and changes over time, and production of related Essential Ocean Variables and indicators, at regional or sea basin scale (sea state, ocean surface stress, sea ice, ocean surface heat fluxes, sea surface and subsurface salinity, sea surface height, sea surface and subsurface temperature, ocean circulation and surface and subsurface currents, ocean layering and density gradient, upwelling) (including GHG fluxes) (TRL 7-8).
OCEAN:ICE will assess the impacts of key Antarctic Ice Sheet and Southern Ocean processes on Planet Earth, via their influence on sea level rise, deep water formation, ocean circulation and climate. An innovative and ambitious combination of observations and numerical models, including coupled ice sheet-climate model development, will be used to improve predictions of how changes in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets impact global climate. It will make new circumpolar and Atlantic observations in observational gaps. It will assimilate these and existing data into improved ice sheet boundary conditions and forcing, producing new estimates of ice sheet melt and impacts on ocean circulation, including the Atlantic Meridional Overturning circulation. It will develop, calibrate and assess models used to predict the future evolution of the giant ice sheets. It will reduce the deep uncertainty in the impact of their melt on societally relevant environmental changes on decadal to multi centennial time scales. It will assess the potential for passing ice sheet 'tipping points' and their consequences for ocean circulation and climate. For more information visit the following web page:
This project proposes to apply the Templex Topological approach to atmosphere, ocean, and hydrology datasets, provided by observations or by numerical simulations. In these three fields, we target advances in our knowledge and in the performance of existing models, allowing us to justify and qualify their use. Theoretical advances in the characterization of extreme events are also expected. Complementary tools for raw data processing, as well as for the topological characterization of extreme events and tipping points, will be elaborated and integrated in a toolkit at the service of Earth System and Environmental Science communities. A Templex is defined as a cell complex endowed with a directed graph (digraph) that conveys the information of the flow direction of the system in terms of allowed or forbidden connections between the cells of the complex approximating the system’s branched manifold
