David Battisti (born 1956) is The Tamaki Endowed Chair of Atmospheric Sciences of the University of Washington and a fellow at the American Geophysical Union. His research interests include understanding how interactions between the ocean, land, atmosphere, and sea ice lead to climatic variability at timescales that vary from seasonal to decadal timescales, [1] as well as the paleoclimate. He is also interested in how climate variability (including El Nino) affects food production. [2]
He received his PhD in 1988 at the University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences. [3] He has published over 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals in atmospheric sciences and oceanography.
He also helps organize an annual set of climate dynamics courses. [4]
Battisti won the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal from the American Meteorological Society in 2021, for his "contributions to understanding climate variability for phenomena ranging from the El Niño/Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation to paleoclimate." [5]
Climatology or climate science is the scientific study of Earth's climate, typically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of at least 30 years. Climate concerns the atmospheric condition during an extended to indefinite period of time; weather is the condition of the atmosphere during a relative brief period of time. The main topics of research are the study of climate variability, mechanisms of climate changes and modern climate change. This topic of study is regarded as part of the atmospheric sciences and a subdivision of physical geography, which is one of the Earth sciences. Climatology includes some aspects of oceanography and biogeochemistry.
El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a climate phenomenon that exhibits irregular periodic variation in winds and sea surface temperatures over the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean. It affects the climate of much of the tropics and subtropics. The warming phase of the sea surface temperature is known as El Niño and the cooling phase as La Niña. The Southern Oscillation is the accompanying atmospheric component, which is coupled with the sea temperature change. El Niño is associated with higher than normal air surface pressure, and La Niña with lower than normal air surface pressure in the tropical western Pacific. The two phenomena last several months each and typically occur every few years with varying intensity, with neutral periods of lower intensity interspersed. Mechanisms that cause the oscillation remain under study.
John Michael Wallace, is a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington, as well as the former director of the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO)—a joint research venture between the University of Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) is a robust, recurring pattern of ocean-atmosphere climate variability centered over the mid-latitude Pacific basin. The PDO is detected as warm or cool surface waters in the Pacific Ocean, north of 20°N. Over the past century, the amplitude of this climate pattern has varied irregularly at interannual-to-interdecadal time scales. There is evidence of reversals in the prevailing polarity of the oscillation occurring around 1925, 1947, and 1977; the last two reversals corresponded with dramatic shifts in salmon production regimes in the North Pacific Ocean. This climate pattern also affects coastal sea and continental surface air temperatures from Alaska to California.
The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), also known as Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (AMV), is the theorized variability of the sea surface temperature (SST) of the North Atlantic Ocean on the timescale of several decades.
Teleconnection in atmospheric science refers to climate anomalies being related to each other at large distances. The most emblematic teleconnection is that linking sea-level pressure at Tahiti and Darwin, Australia, which defines the Southern Oscillation. Another well-known teleconnection links the sea-level pressure over Iceland with the one over the Azores, traditionally defining the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).
Jagadish Shukla is an Indian meteorologist and Distinguished University Professor at George Mason University in the United States.
Sverdrup Gold Medal Award – is the American Meteorological Society's award granted to researchers who make outstanding contributions to the scientific knowledge of interactions between the oceans and the atmosphere.
The Tuvalu Meteorological Service (TMS) is the principal meteorological observatory of Tuvalu and is responsible for providing weather services to the islands of Tuvalu. A meteorological office was established on Funafuti at the time the islands of Tuvalu were administered as parts of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony of the United Kingdom. The meteorological office is now an agency of the government of Tuvalu.
Paul Rowland Julian, a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, is an American meteorologist who served as a longtime staff scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), was co-author with Roland Madden of the study establishing the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO), and contributed to the international, multi-institutional Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP), Tropical Wind, Energy Conversion, and Reference Level Experiment (TWERLE), and Tropical Ocean-Global Atmosphere (TOGA) meteorology research programs. The MJO meteorologic phenomenon he co-discovered is the largest element of the intraseasonal variability in the tropical atmosphere, a traveling pattern arising from large-scale coupling between atmospheric circulation and tropical deep convection. Description of the MJO remains an important contribution to climate research with relevance to modern short- and long-term weather and climate modeling.
Adam A. Scaife FRMetS FInstP is a British physicist and head of long range prediction at the Met Office. He is also a professor at Exeter University. Scaife carries out research into long range weather forecasting and computer modelling of the climate and has published over 250 peer reviewed studies on atmospheric dynamics, computer modelling and climate as well as popular science and academic books on meteorology.
Michael Ghil is an American and European mathematician and physicist, focusing on the climate sciences and their interdisciplinary aspects. He is a founder of theoretical climate dynamics, as well as of advanced data assimilation methodology. He has systematically applied dynamical systems theory to planetary-scale flows, both atmospheric and oceanic. Ghil has used these methods to proceed from simple flows with high temporal regularity and spatial symmetry to the observed flows, with their complex behavior in space and time. His studies of climate variability on many time scales have used a full hierarchy of models, from the simplest ‘toy’ models all the way to atmospheric, oceanic and coupled general circulation models. Recently, Ghil has also worked on modeling and data analysis in population dynamics, macroeconomics, and the climate–economy–biosphere system.
Axel Timmermann is a German climate physicist and oceanographer with an interest in climate dynamics, human migration, dynamical systems' analysis, ice-sheet modeling and sea level. He served a co-author of the IPCC Third Assessment Report and a lead author of IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. His research has been cited over 18,000 times and has an h-index of 70 and i10-index of 161. In 2017, he became a Distinguished Professor at Pusan National University and the founding Director of the Institute for Basic Science Center for Climate Physics. In December 2018, the Center began to utilize a 1.43-petaflop Cray XC50 supercomputer, named Aleph, for climate physics research.
Amy C. Clement is an atmospheric and marine scientist studying and modeling global climate change at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.
Peter George Baines is an Australian geophysicist. He is an honorary senior fellow at University of Melbourne and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Victoria.
Samuel George Harker Philander is a climate scientist, known for his work on atmospheric circulation and oceanic currents, particularly El Niño. He is the Knox Taylor Professor emeritus of Geosciences at Princeton University.
Pacific Meridional Mode (PMM) is a climate mode in the North Pacific. In its positive state, it is characterized by the coupling of weaker trade winds in the northeast Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Baja California with decreased evaporation over the ocean, thus increasing sea surface temperatures (SST); and the reverse during its negative state. This coupling develops during the winter months and spreads southwestward towards the equator and the central and western Pacific during spring, until it reaches the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), which tends to shift north in response to a positive PMM.
Andréa Sardinha Taschetto or A. S. Taschetto; Andréa Taschetto is a climate change scientist at the University of New South Wales, and winner of the Dorothy Hill award. She was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in 2016. Her research has contributed to improved understanding of the role of oceans, on climate variability at regional scales, and from seasonal to mulit-decade timescales. This research also has assisted with future climate projections.
Thomas L. Delworth is an atmospheric and oceanic climate scientist and Senior Scientist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), part of NOAA. He also serves on the faculty of Oceanic Science at Princeton University.