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Climate shifts can be defined as significant, relatively abrupt changes in regional and global climate variables, in particular temperature and rainfall, which persist over a long enough time interval distinguishable from interannual variability and that have substantial socio-economic impacts.
An outstanding example is the abrupt drying of the Sahel in sub-Saharan Africa, which resulted in devastating droughts in the early 1970s and 1980s and distinguished the overall regional rainfall regime during the recent half century from that of the preceding decades. This regional climate shift was related to the rapid cooling of the North Atlantic and the North Pacific, which occurred between the late 1960s and mid-1970s.
In the mid-1990s, a reverse shift occurred consecutively in both ocean basins, with influences on the Asian monsoon, the variability of El Niño and the Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the occurrence of droughts in northern Mexico and the U.S. West and in European climate. Both these climate shifts have been accompanied by changes in the decadal time scale equatorial Pacific sea surface temperature. The Pacific and Atlantic changes were not isolated, and changes in the Indian Ocean region have also been documented.
Paleoclimate research indicates that significant and abrupt climate shifts on a broad range of time scales occurred throughout the Quaternary, during the glacial period, in the glacial to Holocene transition, and during the Holocene, including the last millennium. The reason why such relatively abrupt shifts in the climate system occur, if they should indeed be considered as abrupt rather than gradual, decadal to multidecadal changes, and how they are affected by anthropogenic and other external forcing mechanisms, is still a matter of scientific discussion and debate.
Workshop website: http://www.clivar.org/climate_shifts_2015
Objectives
The aim is to bring together scientists who identify, analyze, and predict climate shifts in reconstructions of past climate as well as in projections of future climate and theoreticians who aim to explain such shifts with models of varying complexity.
We also envisage holding a training component joint to the workshop for students and early career scientists. This will include an intensive lab/training component for example on the analysis of CMIP5 (or CMIP6 if already some available), and techniques to identify climate shifts, etc. The fast intermediate complexity Earth System Model developed in the Earth System Physics Section of the ICTP will be introduced.
Format
The meeting will include plenary sessions with about 15 invited talks and about 25-30 contributed talks and posters. The workshop will be open to all interested, with a maximum number of 150 participants. View the schedule of sessions here. Further refinements of the program will be made over the course of the next several months.
Scientific Organizing Committee
I.-S. Kang (co-organizer; Seoul National University, Korea), G. Lau (co-organizer; Chinese University of Hong Kong, China), J. Kinter (co-organizer, COLA/GMU, U.S.A.), F. Kucharski (local organizer; ICTP, Italy), R. Farneti (local organizer; ICTP, Italy ), A. Pirani (WCRP/CLIVAR), E. Schneider (COLA/GMU, U.S.A.), S. Schubert (GMAO/NASA, U.S.A.), Y. Kushnir (LDEO/Columbia U., U.S.A.)