Anna-Lena Deppenmeier

OS Ocean Sciences

The 2015 Outstanding Student Poster (OSP) Award is awarded to Anna-Lena Deppenmeier for the poster/PICO entitled:

The Bjerknes feedback in the tropical Atlantic from reanalysis and CMIP5 (Deppenmeier, A.-L.; Haarsma, R.; Hazeleger, W.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Anna-Lena Deppenmeier is a PhD student at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, working in close collaboration with the KNMI, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. Her research interest lies at understanding tropical Atlantic variability (TAV), which she investigates from reanalysis and model output. In the tropical Atlantic there is not one dominant mode of variablity which explains most of the variance, but rather an interplay of different modes leading to the observed TAV. The aim of this project is to understand the various mechanisms, processes and interactions and their contributions to TAV and, with that knowledge, to improve model performance. The poster presented at EGU 2015 shows the results of a CMIP5 multi-model analysis in wich the Bjerknes feedback, a mechanism which is thought to be one of the main drivers of interannual TAV, is investigated. The results show that the models simulate a certain part of that mechanism well, while another part is misrepresented, leading to wrong variability in the models. Future research is focussed on finding the origin of the error in subsurface structure in the models and assessing whether correcting the error can lead to better simulated TAV.