Edward Blanchard Wrigglesworth

About

The faculty, staff and students in the Department of Atmospheric and Climate Science at the University of Washington are engaged in the study of a broad range of atmospheric phenomena and processes, using methods ranging from mathematical analysis to field experimentation. Research projects range in size from small studies involving individual scientists to large national and international programs involving teams of scientists. Research groups in the department are concerned with Atmospheric Chemistry, Atmospheric Dynamics, Boundary Layer Processes, Cloud and Aerosol Research, Glaciology and Planetary Atmospheres, Cloud Dynamics, Precipitation Processes, Storms, Weather Analysis and Forecasting, Climate, Global change, Airflow over mountains, and other topics. Some groups maintain special research facilities for the use of their students. In some of these activities, there is close cooperation with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Oregon State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Regional Center through the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies. Faculty members often have interests in more than one area, and research projects frequently involve questions of broad scope which do not fall neatly into a single category. This is particularly true of research projects directed toward understanding the chemical and physical modification of the environment by human activities.

Research topics

• Climatology
• Geology
• Environmental science
• Oceanography
• Physics
• Geomorphology

Selected publications

• The Scientific Legacy of NASA’s Operation IceBridge

  Reviews of Geophysics · 2021 · 147 citations

  Abstract The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Operation IceBridge (OIB) was a 13‐year (2009–2021) airborne mission to survey land and sea ice across the Arctic, Antarctic, and Alaska. Here, we review OIB’s goals, instruments, campaigns, key scientific results, and implications for future investigations of the cryosphere. OIB’s primary goal was to use airborne laser altimetry to bridge the gap in fine‐resolution elevation measurements of ice from space between the conclusion…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Impact of Winds and Southern Ocean SSTs on Antarctic Sea Ice Trends and Variability

  Journal of Climate · 2020 · 105 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Antarctic sea ice extent (SIE) has slightly increased over the satellite observational period (1979 to the present) despite global warming. Several mechanisms have been invoked to explain this trend, such as changes in winds, precipitation, or ocean stratification, yet there is no widespread consensus. Additionally, fully coupled Earth system models run under historic and anthropogenic forcing generally fail to simulate positive SIE trends over this time period. In this work, we quantif…

  DOI

• A Mechanism for the Arctic Sea Ice Spring Predictability Barrier

  Geophysical Research Letters · 2020 · 87 citations

  Abstract The decline of Arctic sea ice extent has created a pressing need for accurate seasonal predictions of regional summer sea ice. Recent work has shown evidence for an Arctic sea ice spring predictability barrier, which may impose a sharp limit on regional forecasts initialized prior to spring. However, the physical mechanism for this barrier has remained elusive. In this work, we perform a daily sea ice mass (SIM) budget analysis in large ensemble experiments from two global climate model…

  DOI

• Sea-surface temperature pattern effects have slowed global warming and biased warming-based constraints on climate sensitivity

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024-03-11 · 65 citations

  articleOpen access

  The observed rate of global warming since the 1970s has been proposed as a strong constraint on equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and transient climate response (TCR)-key metrics of the global climate response to greenhouse-gas forcing. Using CMIP5/6 models, we show that the inter-model relationship between warming and these climate sensitivity metrics (the basis for the constraint) arises from a similarity in transient and equilibrium warming patterns within the models, producing an effecti…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Predicting September Arctic Sea Ice: A Multimodel Seasonal Skill Comparison

  Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society · 2024-04-22 · 22 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract This study quantifies the state of the art in the rapidly growing field of seasonal Arctic sea ice prediction. A novel multimodel dataset of retrospective seasonal predictions of September Arctic sea ice is created and analyzed, consisting of community contributions from 17 statistical models and 17 dynamical models. Prediction skill is compared over the period 2001–20 for predictions of pan-Arctic sea ice extent (SIE), regional SIE, and local sea ice concentration (SIC) initialized on…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Cecilia M. Bitz

  University of Washington

  61 shared

• Lettie A. Roach

  Columbia University

  25 shared

• Martin Vancoppenolle

  Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi

  25 shared

• Kenza Himmich

  Sorbonne Université

  20 shared

• François Massonnet

  UCLouvain

  19 shared

• Mitchell Bushuk

  NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory

  14 shared

• Melinda Webster

  Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

  14 shared

• Steffen Tietsche

  European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts

  13 shared

Education

• PhD, Atmospheric Sciences

  University of Washington

Awards & honors

• WCRP Open Science Conference poster award, Oct 2011
• Top Scholar award, The Graduate School, 2007 (University of…
• Girton College Emily Davies Scholarship, 2003 (University of…
• Girton College Janet Chamberlain Dissertation Prize, 2003 (U…
• Cambridge University William Vaughan Lewis Dissertation Priz…

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