Team 7 - IOW Paleoclimate

This team will examine elements of the climatic and environmental history of the IOW. Professor Bush, for example, will perform numerical climate simulations for the Indian Ocean World, which will be configured for paleoclimate simulations using historical values of Earth's orbital parameters, carbon dioxide and sea level. The simulations will be performed in a two-step process. First, a global coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model will be used to gather global climate data (which will include such important global phenomena as the El Nino Southern Oscillation). Second, the data will then be used to drive a regional model centred on the Indian Ocean. Performing these high-resolution regional simulations for various time slices through the Holocene will determine how the climate dynamics of the region have evolved through the past 10,000 years as Earth's orbital parameters, carbon dioxide levels and sea level changed.

TEAM LEADER

Andrew Bush, University of Alberta

Dr. Andrew Bush is a Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta. He has been Vice-President, President, and Past-President of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society and was Co-editor of the international journal Atmosphere-Ocean for five years. He is a specialist in the numerical modelling of the atmosphere and oceans. Using a combination of global general circulation models and regional mesoscale models, he has explored past climates over the last glacial cycle as well as possible future climates and their impact on continental alpine glaciers. Dr. Bush is a Fellow in the Earth System Evolution Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Studies and is involved in a number of international collaborative projects. He is also active in field campaigns studying high altitude glaciers in the greater Himalaya of Pakistan, India, and Nepal.

COLLABORATORS

Suzanne Leroy, Brunel University

Professor Suzanne Leroy is a palynologist working on sequences ranging from the Pliocene to the present, in the Mediterranean area, N. Africa (Mauritania and Egypt), SW (Caspian Sea and Karabogaz Gol) and central Asia (Issyk-Kul). She works on lake and marine sediment as well as on bat guano and honey. She has led an ICSU conference programme on "Environmental catastrophes and human responses". She has also worked on an EU (RELIEF) project, a Leverhulme Trust one and NATO one on "Earthquake limnology" in Turkey. The British Academy has awarded her a grant to work on the impact of earthquakes on agriculture during the Early Byzantine times as seen from laminites from the Dead Sea. Prof. Leroy is a member of the editorial board of the journal Quaternary International in addition to being the focus leader of the “Hazards and humans” group in the TERPRO commission of INQUA and a member of the Palaeoecology and Human Evolution Commission of INQUA. She is also the supervisor of Charlotte Miller (P/T MPhil) on "A multi-proxy palaeoenvironmental reconstruction from sediment cores, offshore Iran - natural hazards and climatic change within the late Holocene" (2007- 2011).