COMPAS

Based on relocation of the Principal Investigator from the USA to Norway, a group for interdisciplimary studies of climate dynamics will be established. COMPAS will fill the gap in the current understanding, and assess the impact, of the Atlantic Ocean o n the climate of Northern Europe and Norway. COMPAS will develop an innovative and multidisciplinary approach in which theoretical models and the most comprenhsive climate records (i.e., paleo and modern records) strongly interact. COMPAS will improve t he ability to predict the evolution of climate in Norway, and will build Norwegian leadership in a new and exciting area of climate research. Specifically, COMPAS will put bounds on the strength, and elucidate the mechanisms, of the Atlantic Ocean forcing through a joint analysis of theoretical models, modern instrumental (last hundred year) and paleo (last ten thousand years) climate records. In a second step, COMPAS will evaluate, based on the previous analyses, the representation of the Atlantic Ocean forcing in the current generation of climate models. The COMPAS project will be based at the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research (BCCR, Bergen), which complements perfectly the expertise of the Principal Investigator. The BCCR will offer, through its on-going EU projects PACLIVA and DYNAMITE, the best paleo archives and a set of European coupled climate model outputs to be used by COMPAS.