#Decadal to multi-decadal forcing on precipitation and soil moisture in CMIP6 vs. observations
Scientific Motivation
Understanding oceanic and atmospheric forcing on regions around the world, and on what time scales, are important for thinking about the hydroclimate futures of these regions. My particular focus is on understanding hydroclimate variability over South America with an explicit interest in understanding the leading oceanic or atmospheric forcing on precipitation and soil moisture in Chile and Argentina. Since the middle of the 20th Century Chile has experienced a drying trend experiencing more widespread and persistent droughts, similar to the Southwest United States (IPCC, 2014; Garreaud et al. 2017; Bozkurt et al. 2018). However, east of the Andes, Argentina precipitation has increased throughout last century (Barros et al. 2015). Particulary when thinking about the tropical Pacific or tropical Atlantic we want to tease out the influence of decadal to multi-decadal variability for each region. These results will be compared to observations over the instrumental record as well as data from global paleoclimate reconstructions (Steiger, et al. 2018).
Proposed Hacking
Investigate the correlations of climate indices (PDO, AMO, SAM, etc.) to precipitation and soil moisture to understand the temporal variability. Perhaps, if time permits I would like to work on hacking a script to do spectral analysis and look at the stationarity of climate regimes over South America.
Anticipated Data Needs
The data sets I will need are monthly atmospheric data (precipitation and geopotential heights), monthly land data (soil moisture) and monthly ocean data (SST).
Anticipated Software Tools
The main software I will use is xarray.
Desired Collaborators
Anyone excited about climate variability! Also there is overlap with @rabernat’s “Eastern Pacific SST Biases and Trends in CMIP6 vs. Observations” project as well as @rcjwills “Response of tropical Pacific SSTs to climate forcing in CMIP6”, so it’d be great to connect.