“Why does there remain a large uncertainty in projections of climate change? From the Charney Report (1979) to the different iterations of the IPCC assessment reports, the range of the Earth’s surface temperature response to increased greenhouse-gas emissions has remained large. Estimates based on data from climate models, observations, and paleoclimate do not agree with each other, in part due to a sea surface temperature “pattern effect”. Is there any way we can still use observational climate data to diagnose climate models and improve the range of climate change projections? Enter: El Nino and the idea of “emergent constraints”.

Tyler Hanke, originally from St Louis, MO, is a full-time CASE Consultants International employee where he works remotely from Cherokee, NC in archiving and maintaining environmental datasets at Asheville’s National Centers for Environmental Information. In his free-time, he works towards a Master’s (and soon PhD) as a part-time graduate student at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where he studies using observations of the El Nino Southern Oscillation to make better predictions of long-term surface temperature warming and as a diagnostic tool for climate models. It turns out that El Nino, with the extensive amount of physical knowledge surrounding the phenomenon, may provide a strong observational constraint and assist in reducing uncertainty in projections of the Earth’s surface temperature response to rising atmospheric CO2.

Join us as we explore climate change, atmospheric radiation, El Nino, and how all of these may be linked together.”