What role does the ocean play in regulating climate?
How is climate change impacting ocean properties and circulation?

These two questions are major motivators of our group's research interests. Oceanographic research can help
enable societies to make decisions in mitigating and adapating to climate change. Dr. McMonigal's CV is viewable here.

Big picture

Ocean circulation can alter climate by redistributing heat. We expect changes in ocean circulation due to climate change due to changes in windstress and buoyancy, the two primary drivers of motion in the ocean. While much attention has been given to changes to buoyancy driven ocean circulation, less is known about changes that have occurred, and will continue to occur, to wind driven ocean circulation. Our recent paper quantifies the effect of changes in the wind driven ocean circulation onto climate change. The wind driven ocean circulation changes have amplified global warming by 17% over 1979-2014, in a climate model.

Postdoc at NCSU

Currently, I am a post doc at NCSU working with a hierarchy of climate models to address the question of the relative roles that wind and buoyancy forcing play on ocean variability. To do this, we compare fully coupled climate models to models where the ocean does not feel the full effect of the wind stress. Check out our GRL paper applying this to show that the Indian Ocean Dipole does not cause variability in Indian Ocean meridional heat transport.

Improving diversity, equity, and inclusion in oceanography

Science is informed by perspectives and life experiences. The only way to effectively combat climate change is to broaden those who participate in climate science. This depends not only on recruiting diverse people to oceanography, but also on supporting people from underrepresented groups to ensure they can succeed. One aspect of this is to improve experiences at sea. We focus specifically on improving experiences of transgender and gender diverse scientists at sea in a recent preprint

Agulhas System Climate Array cruise 2016

Dr. McMonigal's PhD focused on estimating a time series of South Indian Ocean heat transport from observations. To do this, we used mooring data from the Agulhas System Climate Array (ASCA), as well as Argo and satellite sea surface height. As part of this work, I joined research cruises in the Agulhas Current in April 2016 and June 2018. A presentation of the data from the ASCA mooring array is available here.

Agulhas Group

Dr. McMonigal's PhD work was in the Agulhas Group, led by Prof. Lisa Beal. Check out what they have been up to here!