Welcome to the website of the AWI-LMU joint research group for Southern Ocean-Climate Interactions (SO-CLIM)!
Our group wants to raise awareness for the important role of the ocean in the Earth’s system and how it is changing to strengthen efforts to limit human influences on the ocean and climate. In particular, with our work, we want to understand the essential Southern Ocean’s role in mitigating global climate change in the past, present, and future, and how this highly sensitive region of our planet responds to climatic changes.
The Southern Ocean strongly influences the global climate through its interaction with Earth’s carbon and energy budget. This important role arises from the vast exchange of water between the deep ocean and the sea surface that is unprecedented in the global ocean elsewhere. Over past decades, the Southern Ocean has substantially slowed global surface warming by absorbing most of the excess heat in the climate system and a large fraction of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. However, over the past years the Southern Ocean has experienced drastic changes and, to date, it remains uncertain if it will continue to slow down global surface warming in future to the extent that it has been providing such a service in the past.
While climate models make an important contribution to creating reliable information for decision-makers and society, they still do not represent past observed climatic changes in the Southern Ocean adequately, leading to considerable uncertainties in future projections. In part, these difficulties arise from the inherent challenge to collect observational data in this region and the associated knowledge gap. In our group, we collect and use observational data and deploy numerical models to better understand processes and changes in the Southern Ocean and thus contribute to improving regional and global projections with model simulations.
19.04.2024 >>> Dr. Léa Olivier will present her research on EGU.
01.03.2024 >>> New group member! Dr. Alexander Weinhart joins the SO-CLIM group as scientific assistant / data manager. His mission is to build a novel d18O database of the Southern Ocean.
15.09.2023 >>> New group member! Dr. Léa Olivier expands the SO-CLIM team. In her postdoc position she will investigate changes in the chemistry of the Southern Ocean caused by global warming.
Ludwig Maximilians University Munich:
Group Leader
I am a climate scientist fascinated by the ocean, ice, polar regions and the global carbon and water cycles. In particular, I study the impact of changing freshwater fluxes and ice on the Southern Ocean in past, present and future climates and their linkages to global changes at the interface of observations and models.
Research associate / Data manager
With a novel database for marine oxygen isotopes, we want to better understand the role of the Southern Ocean in context of climate change.
PhD Student (Associate member)
I want to understsand the physical controls behind nutrient supply to the South Georgia phytoplankton bloom using high resolution in-situ observations across the ACC.
PhD Student (Guest)
In my PhD, I aim to understand the observable role that Antarctic Winter Water plays in the Southern Ocean. Antarctic Winter Water is important in connecting the polar Southern Ocean to the global ocean.
At AWI we can be found in the
Physical Oceanography section
and at LMU in the
Department of geography.