Host: Zachary Labe

Over the last century, the major drivers of long-term climate change are greenhouse gases and anthropogenic aerosols. However, they can have opposing impacts on the Earth’s climate through their differing radiative effects on Earth’s energy budget. Disentangling the individual roles of these two climate forcings, including any possible nonlinear interactions, remains a challenging issue for climate science. This new project will leverage state-of-the-art simulations from the NOAA/GFDL SPEAR high-resolution global climate model to explore the influences of anthropogenic aerosols, greenhouse gases, and natural climate variability on regional patterns of climate change and extreme events. This project overall is flexible, and the candidate is encouraged to explore their own interests. The intern and mentor will work together to refine the project topic, but some suggested areas to consider could include the role of anthropogenic aerosols on Arctic amplification, high-latitude precipitation extremes, or effects on large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns, such as the North Atlantic Oscillation.

The intern should have interests in computer programming (e.g., Python, Matlab, R), climate science, and working with large datasets from global climate models. However, no prior experience is necessary in these areas.