Currently, I am a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA.
With Dr. P. Newman and colleagues, I use GEOS chemistry-climate model simulations to investigate stratospheric dynamics, chemistry-climate interactions, and dynamical coupling between ocean, troposphere and stratosphere. As a postdoctoral fellow, I examined the dynamics of the Antarctic polar vortex, future trends in the potential for ozone depletion, and the impact of sea surface temperatures on stratospheric climate. Most recently, my research has focused on the stratospheric response to warm pool El Niño events, and the sensitivity of this response to the phase of the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO), in the Southern Hemisphere.
From 2004 to 2007 I was a PhD student at the Centre for Atmospheric Science, at the University of Cambridge, UK. My work was supervised by Prof. J. Pyle and Dr. P. Braesicke.
My research focused on stratospheric chemistry-climate interactions and involved numerical simulations of the atmosphere. I first used a stratospheric version of the UK Met Office Unified Model (UM) with parameterised stratospheric chemistry (Cariolle and Déqué, 1986), and later, a preliminary version of the UK Chemistry and Aerosols model (UKCA; Morgenstern et al., 2009). This research contributed to CCMVal, an international effort to validate chemistry-climate models, and to SCOUT-O3, a European Commission initiative focusing on the interaction between atmospheric composition and climate.
These publications resulted from my PhD work:
Hurwitz, M.M., P. Braesicke, and J.A. Pyle (2011). Sensitivity of the Mid-Winter Arctic Stratosphere to QBO Width in a Simplified Chemistry-Climate Model. Atm. Sci. Lett., 12, 268-272, doi:10.1002/asl.330.
Morgenstern, O., P. Braesicke, M.M. Hurwitz, F. O'Connor, A. Bushell, C. Johnson and J.A. Pyle (2008). The World Avoided by the Montreal Protocol. Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L16811, doi:10.1029/2008GL034590.
Braesicke, P., M.M. Hurwitz and J.A. Pyle (2006). The Stratospheric response to changes in ozone and carbon dioxide as modelled with a GCM including parameterised stratospheric chemistry. Met. Zeitschrift, 15 (3), 343-354.
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Last updated 30/12/10
Margaret Hurwitz