Joellen Louise Russell

Last updated
Joellen Louise Russell
Russell Headshot v3.jpg
Born1970 (age 53–54)
Seattle, WA
Education
Occupation(s) Oceanographer, climate scientist

Joellen Louise Russell (born 1970) is an American oceanographer and climate scientist. [1]

Contents

Russell is a professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arizona. [2] In Tucson, AZ, with joint appointments in the Departments of Lunar and Planetary Sciences, Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences, and in the Mathematics Department’s Program in Applied Mathematics. In 2017, she was named as the Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair of Integrative Science. [3]

Early life and education

Russell was born in Seattle, WA in 1970, and grew up in Kotzebue, Alaska, a fishing village 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where her father worked for the Indian Health Service. At age 12, she knew she wanted to be an oceanographer. Russell attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH, received a School Year Abroad in Rennes, France, was a Radcliffe National Scholar at Harvard University where she earned an A.B. in Environmental Geoscience. She had her first research cruise to the Southern Ocean in 1994 and spent nearly a year of her graduate career at sea there before completing her PhD in Oceanography in 1999 from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. She earned a JISAO Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Washington and then spent several years as a research scientist at Princeton University and the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, NJ during the preparation for the 4th Assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR4). Russell became a member of the faculty of the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arizona in 2006, and became a full professor in 2019.

Career and impact of research

Russell’s research [4] explores the role of the ocean in the global climate, [5] focusing on the Southern Ocean [6] and the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds. She uses global climate and earth system models [7] to simulate the climate and carbon cycle of the past, the present and the future, and develops observationally-based metrics to evaluate these simulations. [8] Russell's work on the westerly winds led to her greatest research accomplishment so far: the creation of a new paradigm in climate science, namely that warmer climates produce stronger westerly winds. [9] This insight solved one of the long-standing climate paradoxes, the mechanism responsible for transferring one-third of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into the ocean and then back out again during our repeated glacial-interglacial cycles. [10]

Russell is the lead for the modeling theme of the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling project (SOCCOM) [11] including its Southern Ocean Model Intercomparison Project (SOMIP) [12]

She currently serves as the Chair of the NOAA Science Advisory Board’s Climate Working Group, [13] as an Objective Leader [14] for the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research’s AntarcticClimate21, [15] and on the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Earth System Model (CESM) advisory board. [16]

Russell is one of founding members of Science Moms, a nonpartisan group of climate scientists, who are also mothers, working to demystify climate change. [17]

Impact

Russell is one of the 14 climate scientists behind an amicus curiae brief supporting the plaintiff in the historic 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision on carbon dioxide emissions and climate change, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, et al. v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This amicus brief [18] was the only one cited in this landmark decision that established that carbon dioxide is an atmospheric pollutant and that the EPA must regulate it.

Awards and recognition

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References

  1. ↑ "Joellen Russell". Joellen Russell. Retrieved 2021-10-30.
  2. ↑ "Melting Antarctic Ice Sheets Have Made Southern Ocean More Acidic, Warmer". AZoCleantech.com. 2020-01-08. Retrieved 2020-03-28.
  3. ↑ "Honor for Scientist Joellen Russell". UANews. 2020-03-28. Archived from the original on 2020-03-28. Retrieved 2020-03-28.
  4. ↑ "The World's Best Natural Defense Against Climate Change May Soon Make Things Worse". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  5. ↑ Russell, Joellen (2018-03-13). "Ocean sensors can track progress on climate goals". Nature. 555 (7696): 287. Bibcode:2018Natur.555..287R. doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-03068-w . PMID   29542704.
  6. ↑ "2. The Southern Ocean Has Been Hit Worst". EcoWatch. 2020-01-29. Archived from the original on 2020-03-28. Retrieved 2020-03-28.
  7. ↑ Eyring, Veronika; Cox, Peter M.; Flato, Gregory M.; Gleckler, Peter J.; Abramowitz, Gab; Caldwell, Peter; Collins, William D.; Gier, Bettina K.; Hall, Alex D.; Hoffman, Forrest M.; Hurtt, George C. (February 2019). "Taking climate model evaluation to the next level". Nature Climate Change. 9 (2): 102–110. Bibcode:2019NatCC...9..102E. doi:10.1038/s41558-018-0355-y. hdl: 20.500.11850/323491 . ISSN   1758-6798. S2CID   92281759.
  8. ↑ Russell, Joellen L.; Kamenkovich, Igor; Bitz, Cecilia; Ferrari, Raffaele; Gille, Sarah T.; Goodman, Paul J.; Hallberg, Robert; Johnson, Kenneth; Khazmutdinova, Karina; Marinov, Irina; Mazloff, Matthew (2018). "Metrics for the Evaluation of the Southern Ocean in Coupled Climate Models and Earth System Models". Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans. 123 (5): 3120–3143. Bibcode:2018JGRC..123.3120R. doi: 10.1002/2017JC013461 . hdl: 10150/629146 . ISSN   2169-9291.
  9. ↑ Toggweiler, J. R.; Russell, Joellen (2008). "Ocean circulation in a warming climate". Nature. 451 (7176): 286–288. Bibcode:2008Natur.451..286T. doi: 10.1038/nature06590 . ISSN   1476-4687. PMID   18202645.
  10. ↑ Toggweiler, J. R.; Russell, Joellen L.; Carson, S. R. (2006). "Midlatitude westerlies, atmospheric CO 2 , and climate change during the ice ages: WESTERLIES AND CO 2 DURING THE ICE AGES". Paleoceanography. 21 (2): n/a. doi: 10.1029/2005PA001154 .
  11. ↑ Bruess, Ellen (2019-10-16). "4,000 floating robots take on climate change". Medill Reports Chicago. Retrieved 2020-03-28.
  12. ↑ "Melting Antarctic ice could slow global temperature rise, study says". Carbon Brief. 2018-11-19. Retrieved 2020-03-28.
  13. ↑ Frank, Thomas. "Ocean Acidification Threatens the U.S. Economy". Scientific American. Retrieved 2020-03-28.
  14. ↑ Nash, Rosemary. "AntClim21 Members". SCAR. Retrieved 2020-04-13.
  15. ↑ Nash, Rosemary. "Antarctic Climate Change in the 21st Century (AntClim21)". SCAR. Archived from the original on 2020-07-27. Retrieved 2020-04-13.
  16. ↑ "CESM Administration Board". www.cesm.ucar.edu. Retrieved 2020-04-13.
  17. ↑ "The Moms Who Are Battling Climate Change". The New Yorker. 2021-04-12. Retrieved 2021-08-09.
  18. ↑ "Search - Supreme Court of the United States". www.supremecourt.gov. Retrieved 2020-03-28.
  19. ↑ "UA Endowed Chairs and Professors". Thomas R. Brown Foundations. Retrieved 2020-04-13.
  20. ↑ "Distinguished Scholars | UA Faculty Affairs". facultyaffairs.arizona.edu. Retrieved 2020-04-15.
  21. ↑ "1885 Society Distinguished Scholars Selected | UA@Work". uaatwork.arizona.edu. Archived from the original on 2021-07-21. Retrieved 2020-04-15.
  22. ↑ "Comer Fellows - Comer Family Foundation". www.comerfamilyfoundation.org. Retrieved 2020-04-15.
  23. ↑ "AAPG 2011-2012 AAPG Distinguished Lecture Series Abstracts, #90136 (2011)". www.searchanddiscovery.com. Retrieved 2020-04-15.
  24. ↑ "Faculty Awards & Honors". The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. 2018-01-22. Retrieved 2020-04-15.
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