Inaugural lecture: 'Exploring Antarctic Climate Change' - Professor Julie Jones

Inaugural lecture: 'Exploring Antarctic Climate Change'

To understand how human activity has affected the climate system, and to improve projections of future climate change, it is important to understand how and why climate is changing. Although the Antarctic and the high latitude Southern Hemisphere may seem remote, they play a vitally important role in the global climate system.  This is because of the potential sea level rise locked up in the Antarctic Ice sheets, and storage of heat and carbon in the vast Southern Ocean.  Understanding climate change in these regions is thus essential—not only for Antarctica and its ecosystems, but for the entire planet.

The region’s sparse human presence and the surrounding ocean mean that the climate observations that are key for such understanding are limited in both duration and geographic coverage.   Unlike regions with a long history of human habitation, such as Europe, where regular meteorological observations extend back a century or more, such observations in the Antarctic began in the International Geophysical Year of 1957/58.  

In this lecture I will explore, using examples from my research, ways in which climate records can be extended using alternative data sources, such as tree rings, and the use of historical observations from the logbooks of ships sailing the world’s oceans. I will outline how such climate reconstructions have helped to untangle the roles of greenhouse gases, stratospheric ozone depletion, and tropical climate variability on Antarctic climate change.  I will also introduce my most recent research on extreme weather events over the Antarctic.

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Professor Julie Jones is a climate scientist with an interest in reconstructing and understanding past climate variability, with a particular interest in the Antarctic and the Southern Hemisphere.

Julie obtained her BSc in Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich.  She then moved to the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at UEA for her PhD research, looking at the Implications of Climate Change for Acidic Deposition over Europe, which she completed in 1997.  Following a short period of postdoctoral research in CRU, she moved to a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Coastal Systems at the Helmholz-Zentrum Hereon, Geesthacht, Germany, where in 2005 she became group leader of the Palaeoclimate research group. Julie took up a lectureship in Climate Science in the Department of Geography in Sheffield in August 2006. She is also a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society.