The first talk of the semester was a great success, thanks to Christina Karamperidou and her excellent and highly detailed presentation. Ms. Karamperidou is a PhD student at Columbia University who has been working with some fairly high level models of the El Nino – Southern Oscillation (ENSO).  Her talk for GEOS focused on how different aspects of ENSO  are responsible for varying amounts of uncertainly in analysis of the system. She performed perturbation analyses of the system in part in order to do this.

Beyond the technical aspect, Ms. Karamperidou told us that she’s been working on this project in detail for around 2 years to get to the point where she is now.  This certainly shows the level of dedication needed for a great PhD project. She related the work, in a side note, to something attributed to one of the JASON project scientists; to paraphrase, one of the major stumbling blocks in our understanding of our Climate system is that our ‘observation time’ is so (relatively short). If only we had thousands of years observation. In the model that Ms. Karamperidou used, that’s exactly the case, a 2,000 year General Circulation Model run!

Here are some photos from the talk.