Anta-Clarisse Sarr
Anta-Clarisse Sarr is a paleoclimate modeler, currently pursuing postdoctoral research at University of Oregon, USA. Before joining UO, she received a PhD in Earth System Sciences at University Grenoble Alpes, France in 2018 and held postdoctoral positions at CNRS and Aix-Marseille University, France. Her research focus is on understanding how the climate system responds to different forcing such as paleogeography, atmospheric pCO2 or Earth’s orbit ; and aims to improve knowledge of climate dynamics and past climate evolution. Her work includes investigating the evolution of the South Asian summer monsoon over the last 20 millions of years and how it interacted with Indian Ocean surface dynamics and biogeochemistry.
An Indian ocean modeling perspective on the Miocene South Asian monsoon evolution.
South Asian monsoon winds and rainfalls affect, among others, the surface circulation and seawater properties of the tropical Indian Ocean. Evidence of past monsoon changes are thereby fingerprinted in the paleoceanographic record that have been used extensively to evaluate long-term monsoon evolution and better understand its response to climate change. Yet, the interpretation of marine archives often seems to conflicts with that of the continental record, highlighting our limited understanding of regional climate dynamics and how it reacts to evolving regional paleogeography and global climate. Part of the existing discrepancies arise from the difficulty to disentangle mechanisms that force the signal recorded in the archives.
In this presentation I will show results from tracers-enabled Earth System models that help bridging the gap between proxy-based reconstructions and simulations; and explore how mountain building, seaway closures and global climate change shaped the evolution of both South Asian monsoon and tropical Indian Ocean during the Miocene (23-5 million of years). The integration of modeling results with the proxy record highlight that the drivers of South Asian monsoon evolution over long time scales are complex. Monsoon winds and rainfall respond to different elements of the geography, including but not limited to the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau, but also to changes in the global oceanic circulation and the cryosphere. Better understanding how the two latter elements of the climate system changed over the past and mechanisms that connect them to the regional ocean-atmosphere dynamics might help filling the gap in our understanding of past monsoon.
