Research#

Overview#

I am broadly interested in the behavior of the climate system at the global scale. Our group’s research is oriented toward fundamental questions such as:

  • What factors control the global mean temperature and its equator-to-pole gradient?

  • What determines the rate of global warming, land-ocean contrasts, and polar amplification?

  • Why has Earth’s climate been more variable during some periods of the deep geological past than others?

  • Is the climate unique, or does the Earth system possess multiple equilibria?

By studying the fundamental underlying rules governing the climate system, we build a deeper understanding of the past and future evolution of climate on Earth, and other planets as well.

Background#

Attempting to answer the above questions inevitably involves studying the often-surprising interactions among different components of the climate system: atmosphere, ocean, ice, etc. I have broad training in both atmospheric science and oceanography, and I am particularly interested in coupled atmosphere-ocean climate dynamics over long time scales. I also have special interests in polar climate, ocean-sea ice interaction, and radiative feedback processes. In recent years I have also become very passionate about open, reproducible science, and the crucial role of technology and software in that process. I encourage my students to pursue a broad graduate education that aligns with their own interests.

Philosophy, approach, and tools#

Our group’s work typically takes a building blocks approach, trying to build understanding of the complex climate system through judicious simplification. We explore ideas using hierarchies of idealized atmosphere-ocean models, ranging from simple mathematical descriptions to complex coupled numerical calculations.

Our day-to-day work rests upon these three pillars:

  • Curiosity: Science is ultimately about the fun of asking questions and seeking answers. Remembering to follow your curiosity is a serious business.

  • Rigor: We can’t answer questions without striving to answer question well! We aim to be careful, thoughtful, and quantitative in all our work, and communicate our results are clearly as possible.

  • Openness and reproducibility: Science is also fundamentally about communication. Given the central role of computation in our field, we have a special responsibility to guard against the proliferation of non-reproducible results. We embrace open science as a core value, and we put time and effort into developing tools that serve the scientific community.

Some specific tools we work with:

  • Numerical climate models such as the Community Earth System Model (CESM) and the MITgcm

  • climlab, a flexible Python-based toolkit for building model hierarchies (developed right here in our group but used worldwide!)

  • Atmospheric reanalysis data products such as the MERRA-2 from NASA.

  • Python and Jupyter notebooks for most of our day-to-day analysis work.

  • Good old-fashioned pencil and paper!

Current projects#

Some specific ongoing research interests and projects include:

  • Effects of ocean heat uptake, natural variability, and pattern effects on climate sensitivity and radiative feedback processes

  • Understanding the land-atmosphere processes controlling desert amplification

  • The observed vertical structure of heat fluxes into the Arctic and their role in polar amplification

  • Multiple equilibria in the coupled climate system

  • The dynamics of past warm climates and glacial-interglacial transitions

  • Oceanography of Snowball Earth

  • Effects of obliquity on exoplanet climate

You can find all our group’s publications here on this site. You can also find Brian’s full CV on github

Collaborators#

Some of Brian’s collaborators and coauthors (past and present):

On this page
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