Antara Banerjee

Tara Banerjee will work with members of the Chemical Sciences Laboratory at NOAA to improve fundamental understanding of the drivers of global climate change and large-scale atmospheric dynamics. In today’s changing world, understanding our planet’s climate sensitivity to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations is critical to future climate projections that inform policy makers. However, our atmosphere contains a number of other key forcing agents, such as aerosols and non-CO2 greenhouse gases, whose effectiveness in changing Earth’s global surface temperature remains poorly quantified and understood. In this project, Tara will conduct a series of targeted simulations with NCAR’s Earth System Model in order to quantify effectiveness of these forcing agents in changing Earth’s global climate and atmospheric circulation patterns, relative to CO2. The project will also investigate the extent to which internal variability might hinder our detection of these changes. This work will provide valuable results that quantify the degree and impacts of climate change, reconcile model-observational discrepancies, and inform both long- and short-term climate policy.