Research interests:

Our research deals with climate dynamics, trying to understand physical processes that affect Earth's climate on time scales of a few years to millions of years. Climate variability results from a rich set of nonlinear, sometime chaotic, physical interactions of the oceans, atmosphere and at times the biosphere as well. The distinguishing characteristic of this research area is that it is still at a stage where the very basic questions are often still unanswered. This clearly makes it a fascinating field to work in for scientists/ students with a physics background who are interested in applying physical/ mathematical principles to the study of the natural world. In addition, climate of course is a research area with practical aspects directly affecting our life, creating an engaging combination of a scientific challenge and societal relevance.

Please follow the links below for more details on our different activities.

El-Niño's dynamics, including its irregularity, predictability, possible chaotic behavior, and the role and dynamics of westerly wind bursts.

Large-scale oceanic circulation: the thermohaline circulation, climate stability and variability, ocean and climate dynamics.
Past Climate dynamics: This has been a major focus of ours over the past few years, and our work includes the study of glacial-interglacial oscillations, abrupt climate change, Equable (warm) past climates (50 Myr ago), Pliocene "permanent El Nino" (2-5 Myr ago), Snowball-Earth (800-570 Myr ago), and more.
Ice dynamics dabbling: including ice stream dynamics, ice flow on Snowball-Earth.

Combining oceanographic data and models through modern, sophisticated and powerful methods such as four dimensional variational data assimilation based on the adjoint method.
Our research has been supported by the NSF climate dynamics program, the NSF ESH program, the NSF P2C2 program, by the McDonnell Foundation, by the NOAA office of global programs, NASA and the DoE.

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