Co-chairs: Sarah Rosengard and Daniel Rothenberg

This session has a broad scope exploring past climate and sea-level, with a particular focus examining the role and response of the cryosphere to climate forcing. The chosen talks give an introduction to some of these approaches, including remote sensing, geochemistry and numerical modelling, to explore the dynamics and interactions of ice, water, and climate today and in the past. The combination of past climate reconstruction with modern observations and modelling of the response of glaciers and ice sheets to warming is of particular scientific interest in the context of current climate change.
Session chair: Christopher Kinsley

Despite its great societal importance, the hydrological cycle on regional scales is poorly understood. Because of this, projections for how the hydrological cycle may change with climate are highly uncertain. This session’s talks will focus on the fundamental mechanisms controlling precipitation and evaporation on a variety of scales and in different climates, with the aim of improving our understanding of this critical element of the Earth system.
Session chair: Mike Byrne

Caroline Ummenhofer
Caroline Ummenhofer received a Joint Honours B.Sc. in Marine Biology and Physical Oceanography from the University of Wales, Bangor, UK, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics, specializing in climate modeling, from The University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. Her PhD thesis received the Uwe Radok Award in ocean/atmosphere/climate science by the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. Caroline was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems, held a Vice-Chancellor Postdoctoral Fellowship at UNSW, and was a Visiting Fellow with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Hobart, Australia. Since 2012, she is an Assistant Scientist in the Physical Oceanography Department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, USA. Her research interests include interannual to decadal climate variability, the hydrological cycle, monsoon dynamics, ocean-atmosphere interactions, droughts, extratropical climate, hydroclimate paleo reconstructions of the last millennium, and the effects of climate variability and change on agriculture. In particular, her research focuses on Indian Ocean dynamics, its variability and role for regional rainfall variations and droughts in the surrounding countries, spanning from seasonal to decadal timescales. Her research on the importance of a re-occurring Indian Ocean temperature pattern for Australian rainfall was awarded the prestigious 2008 Land & Water Australia Eureka Prize for Water Research and Innovation and is meanwhile routinely used by the Department of Agriculture and Food in Western Australia as one of five key indicators of growing season rainfall for farmers. A key goal of Caroline’s research has been to bridge the gap between ocean and climate dynamics and its impacts on end users. As such, she aims to provide practical outcomes of use to stakeholders in the agriculture and water management sectors, interacting with media, farmers’ organizations, and the broader public.

Processes involving aerosols and clouds are some of the least understood aspects of the climate despite a significant role in determining current and future climate. Presentations in this session will explore some of the ways aerosol particles interact with radiation, water vapor, and circulation, and how these interactions can influence climate on various length and timescales. In particular, speakers will present results from both modeling and observational studies that investigate several such interactions.
Session chair: Sarvesh Garimella

Couplings between the human and climate systems are both incredibly complex and incredibly important. The inevitable question of “How should societies should address climate change?” has held prominent national and international stages very recently, and was highlighted by the largely successful Montreal Protocol in 1987. Approaches to answering this question have important political, economic, scientific, and social implications. In this session, we explore societal perspectives on climate change, mechanisms of adaptation and/or mitigation of climate change, and thought processes behind climate policy.
Session chair: Daniel Gilford

The organization of convection occurs for a wider range of scales in the tropics than anywhere else on Earth. In this session we will hear first how local convection is impacted by a warming atmosphere. Then we will hear about organized convection in the form of both tropical cyclones and monsoons, through observational data and modeling. Finally the response of the Hadley circulation to climate change is discussed.
Session chair: Morgan O’Neill

The great breadth of large scale atmospheric dynamics is reflected well in the variety of topics of this session. We will explore the scenario of a collapsing ice sheet as well as discuss the oceans influence on surface temperatures. Furthermore, we will discuss trends in both the tropospheric summers and the stratospheric spring.
Session chair: Andy Miller

The talks in this session cover a wide range of spatial and temporal scales from recent alterations of ecosystems at the stand level up to alterations of whole ecosystem composition since the last glacial maximum. To cover this range a wide array of techniques have been used incorporating field measurements, remote sensing, and process modeling. These talks deepen our knowledge of the coupled interaction of terrestrial ecosystems with the broader climate system through alterations in energy fluxes and the water and carbon cycles. Furthermore, they inform management decision by illustrating what change has occurred and the background of change against which this change operates.
Session chair: Ethan Butler (Harvard)

The ocean helps transport heat to the poles, influences storm tracks and large scale weather, and its circulation can directly affect coastal communities. Indeed, ocean dynamics play a key part in the climate system at many scales. In this session, we will hear analysis of both models and observations of everything from large scale current systems to eddies and even fjord dynamics.
Session chairs: Isabela Le Bras, Alec Bogdanoff

On timescales of thousands of years or less, changes in ocean carbon budgets can have a drastic first-order control on atmospheric CO2 levels. Complicating this picture is the fact that thousands of chemical reactions ranging from physically controlled (gas exchange), to geologically (seafloor weathering) and biologically (biological pump) influenced are constantly pushing and pulling on marine dissolved carbon levels. Here, speakers take both observational and numerical approaches to attempt to simplify this picture and understand how ocean chemical processes will respond to a changing atmosphere.
Session chair: Jordon Hemingway