STOEC

The objectives of this proposal are to improve our understanding of the nature of the N.Atlantic Storm-Track, the causes of its variability including interaction with the underlying ocean, and the influence on European climate of this variability. Such advances are crucial to improving the GCMs used to predict anthropogenic change, in the interpretation of these GCMs and in maximising the predictive power for European weather and climate on time-scales from weeks to seasons. The objectives will be met using sophisticated diagnosis of Hadley Centre model runs, of the ECMWF observational reanalyses and of controlled experiments with an hierarchy of models from GCMs to idealised process models. The atmospheric models will be run with fixed SSTs and simplified upper ocean models.