Susan Kurien believes small things can make a big difference.Posted August 13, 2007
Susan Kurien believes small things can make a big difference.
Kurien, a researcher at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, studies how the physics of small-scale ocean phenomena influence large-scale climate. The work she and her fellow researchers do could improve the models scientists rely upon to predict global climate change.
Small-scale effects are “happening continuously, so eventually you would have to feel them in the large scales,” such as slow-moving currents and long-term climate, says Kurien, who came to Los Alamos as a postdoctoral researcher in 2002. They’re a bit like drops of rain, she says: Each alone is a tiny amount of water, but added together they can cause a massive flood.
One example, Kurien says, is the effect of “dense water overflows” – relatively fast, deep ocean rivers a few hundred meters across. These continuously feed into the global ocean circulation current, a slow, thousand-year flow extending across the world’s oceans over tens of thousands of kilometers (see the figure on the next page).
She adds: “We want to understand the fundamental physics of small-scale fast processes that affect the large, slow processes over long time scales” so computer models can incorporate them.
Of course, when the ocean is the subject, “small” is relative.
“For example, the Pacific Ocean is more than 10,000 kilometers at its widest, so 10 kilometers is “tiny” by comparison, Kurien says, but “it turns out that those scales and the scales smaller than that actually have strong effects on ocean dynamics” over centuries.