Grad Student Brian Rose Receives Postdoctoral Fellowship

It is with the greatest of pleasure that we are able to announce that recent doctoral candidate Brian Rose has been awarded a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship for his research proposal entitled "Understanding the vertical structure of Arctic climate change".

This fellowship provides up to two years of funding to pursue independent postdoctoral research under the supervision of a host scientist.  In Brian's case, that will be Prof. David Battisti in the Atmospheric Sciences dept. at UW.  Brian's proposed  research will focus on mechanisms of Arctic climate change.  He plans to study interactions between local radiative processes over sea ice and the large-scale dynamical processes that supply much of the energy to the Arctic.  In particular he is interested in exploring possible feedbacks between the stratification of the Arctic atmosphere and the poleward energy fluxes into the Arctic, which he intends to investigate through data analysis and a hierarchy of idealized models of the atmosphere and sea ice.  He hopes that this work can yield new insight into the polar amplification of climate change, and the expected future trajectory for Arctic climate.

Originally from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Brian came to PAOC in 2004 after attending McGill University in Montreal, where he obtained Bachelors (1999) and Masters (2002) degrees from the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. While at McGill he became fascinated by the global-scale physics of the climate system, particularly the role of the oceans in mediating long-term climate changes.  This interest eventually led to to the PhD program in Climate Physics and Chemistry within PAOC, where, for the past 6 years, he has been studying with John Marshall.  Asked "Why PAOC?", Rose explained he chose MIT/EAPS/PAOC because it seemed to be the best place to simultaneously acquire a very rigorous education in atmosphere-ocean science, and be permitted (and encouraged) to ask deep questions about the nature of Earth and its climate.  

Rose's PhD thesis was entitled "Oceanic Control of the Sea Ice Edge and Multiple Equilibria in the Climate System". In it he investigated the spatial structure of ocean heat transport and its role in defining the mean state of sea ice cover.  Arguing on the basis of hierarchies of idealized global models, that multiple equilibria of global temperature and sea ice are robust features of the climate system, he hopes his results may help guide wider thinking about the large and sometimes very rapid climate changes that have occurred throughout Earth's history.  

While waiting to take up his position at UW in December, Brian will continue to pursue his research as a postdoc with John Marshall; using a coupled atmosphere-ocean-sea ice GCM to study the dynamics of transitions between cold climates with large sea ice caps and warm climates with little ice.