Diabatic Aspects of ENSO

Dr. De-Zheng Sun is a Senior Research Scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences ( CIRES), University of Colorado, a cooperative institute between the University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA). His specialty is climate dynamics, a discipline in climate sciences that studies the changes in the state of the climate system from the first principles--the Newton's laws of motion and the laws of thermodynamics. The goal of research is to understand the stability of the climate system under anthropogenic forcing, addressing questions such as whether we will have stronger and more frequent El Nino events, or whether the whole planet may undergo a Venus-style, run-away instability in response to anthropogenic forcing. Dr. Sun pioneered the study of the role of ENSO events in the long-term heat balance of the tropical Pacific, delineated the relationship between the amplitude of ENSO and the meridional differential heating, discovered the rectification effect of ENSO into the mean climate as a mechanism for climate changes on decadal and longer time-scales, and advanced the understanding of the role of ocean-atmosphere coupling in general and El Nino events in particular in regulating the tropical maximum Sea Surface Temperature. He is currently studying the response of El Nino events to the rise of CO2 and other man-made greeenghouse gases in the atmosphere. Dr. Sun received his Ph.D. in Meteorology from MIT and had worked in the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of Princeton University and the Global and Climate Dynamics Division of National Center for Atmospheric Research before joining CIRES. He has taught both undergraduate and graduate classes in climate change sciences in University of Colorado at Boulder. In collaborations with colleagues, he has produced a monograph "Climate Dynamics: Why Does Climate Vary?" published by American Geophysical Union (AGU). Dr.Sun also concerns the public education about climate change and has talked to the media frequently on this subject.