Michael Ghil | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | American, Israeli |
Alma mater | Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences |
Known for | Boolean Delay Equations, Climate Dynamics, Data Assimilation, El Niño-Southern Oscillation, Singular Spectrum Analysis |
Awards | APS Fellow (2022) A. Wegener Medal (2012) L. F. Richardson Medal (2004) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Climate Science |
Institutions | UCLA, École normale supérieure |
Thesis | (1975) |
Doctoral advisor | Peter Lax |
Notable students | Hervé Le Treut |
Michael Ghil (born 10 June 1944 in Budapest, Hungary) [1] 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. [1] 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. [2] Recently, Ghil has also worked on modeling and data analysis in population dynamics, macroeconomics, and the climate–economy–biosphere system.
He is currently a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. [3]
Ghil spent his childhood in Romania before moving to Israel. [4] He studied Mechanical Engineering at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel from where he received his B.Sc. in August 1966, and his M.Sc. in June 1971. He studied mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, New York from where he received a Master's in February 1973 and a Ph.D. in June 1975, under the supervision of Peter Lax (Abel Prize 2005). [4] His doctoral dissertation title was “A Nonlinear Parabolic Equation with Applications to Climate Theory". [5]
Ghil was affiliated with the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, from September 1971 until May 1987, first as a Research Assistant (1971–1975) and then as a Research Professor (1982–1987), via intermediate appointments. While in New York, he was a NAS/NRC Research Associate at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York from August 1975 to September 1976. [4]
In 1985 Ghil was appointed a full professor of Climate Dynamics at the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also served as a chairman of the same Department from September 1988 to June 1992. From July 1994 until June 2003 he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Climate Dynamics at UCLA, as well as the Director of the Institute of Geophysics & Planetary Physics, UCLA, from July 1992 until June 2003. He served as the Director of the Environmental Research & Teaching Institute (CERES-ERTI), of École Normale Supérieure in Paris from November 2002 until September 2010 and as a Head of the Geosciences Department of ENS from July 2003 until December 2009, where he was also a Distinguished Professor of Geosciences from September 2002 until September 2012. [4]
Since October 2003 until today, he is a Distinguished Research Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at École Normale Supérieure, Paris from September 2012. [6] [7]
Ghil has played an important role in the foundations of modern theoretical climate dynamics. [8] [9] During the late 1970s, he worked in the application of dynamical systems theory to problems of the climate sciences. Starting from the work of Budyko [10] and Sellers, [11] Ghil proposed a 1D Energy Balance Model able to provide a succinct but essentially correct description of the climate system. [12] Ghil's analysis complemented the ones by Budyko and Sellers and played a key role for understanding the multistability of the Earth system, which features competing snowball and warm states. Paleoclimatological evidence that the Earth had indeed experienced snowball episodes in the Pre-Cambrian emerged in the 1990s. [13] Energy balance models like Ghil's, once supplemented with stochastic forcings (along the direction of Hasselmann’s programme) led to the discovery of phenomena like stochastic resonance. [14]
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Ghil contributed to the development of data assimilation techniques in meteorology and oceanography, [15] and to the theory of low-frequency variability of the atmosphere (with a special emphasis on the study of blocking), as well as to the understanding of large-scale ocean dynamics. He introduced the use of advanced spectral methods for the analysis of chaotic geophysical time series, [16] and most prominently the singular-spectrum analysis technique (SSA). [17] [18] In the 2000s, he extended his studies of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon (ENSO) using Boolean delay and delay differential equations, [19] and worked on the statistics and dynamics of extreme events. Recently, Ghil proposed the pullback attractor as a mathematical framework able to encompass the random and time-dependent nature of the climate system. Another area of research has been the development of data-driven methods for reconstructing the surrogate dynamics of partially observed systems. [20] Additionally, he has contributed to data analysis and modeling in macroeconomics and population dynamics, as well as to coupled climate-economy-biosphere modeling. [21]
A selection of books and papers is given below.
Theory of Climate Dynamics and Climate Variability
Paleoclimate
Data assimilation
Blockings
Dynamical Systems Theory
Macroeconomics & coupled climate-macroeconomics
Numerical climate models use quantitative methods to simulate the interactions of the important drivers of climate, including atmosphere, oceans, land surface and ice. They are used for a variety of purposes from study of the dynamics of the climate system to projections of future climate. Climate models may also be qualitative models and also narratives, largely descriptive, of possible futures.
Richard Siegmund Lindzen is an American atmospheric physicist known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides, and ozone photochemistry. He is the author of more than 200 scientific papers. From 1972 to 1982, he served as the Gordon McKay Professor of Dynamic Meteorology at Harvard University. In 1983, he was appointed as the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he would remain until his retirement in 2013. Lindzen has disputed the scientific consensus on climate change and criticizes what he has called "climate alarmism".
Numerical weather prediction (NWP) uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. Though first attempted in the 1920s, it was not until the advent of computer simulation in the 1950s that numerical weather predictions produced realistic results. A number of global and regional forecast models are run in different countries worldwide, using current weather observations relayed from radiosondes, weather satellites and other observing systems as inputs.
Data assimilation is a mathematical discipline that seeks to optimally combine theory with observations. There may be a number of different goals sought – for example, to determine the optimal state estimate of a system, to determine initial conditions for a numerical forecast model, to interpolate sparse observation data using knowledge of the system being observed, to set numerical parameters based on training a model from observed data. Depending on the goal, different solution methods may be used. Data assimilation is distinguished from other forms of machine learning, image analysis, and statistical methods in that it utilizes a dynamical model of the system being analyzed.
A tropical cyclone forecast model is a computer program that uses meteorological data to forecast aspects of the future state of tropical cyclones. There are three types of models: statistical, dynamical, or combined statistical-dynamic. Dynamical models utilize powerful supercomputers with sophisticated mathematical modeling software and meteorological data to calculate future weather conditions. Statistical models forecast the evolution of a tropical cyclone in a simpler manner, by extrapolating from historical datasets, and thus can be run quickly on platforms such as personal computers. Statistical-dynamical models use aspects of both types of forecasting. Four primary types of forecasts exist for tropical cyclones: track, intensity, storm surge, and rainfall. Dynamical models were not developed until the 1970s and the 1980s, with earlier efforts focused on the storm surge problem.
A Boolean Delay Equation (BDE) is an evolution rule for the state of dynamical variables whose values may be represented by a finite discrete numbers os states, such as 0 and 1. As a novel type of semi-discrete dynamical systems, Boolean delay equations (BDEs) are models with Boolean-valued variables that evolve in continuous time. Since at the present time, most phenomena are too complex to be modeled by partial differential equations (as continuous infinite-dimensional systems), BDEs are intended as a (heuristic) first step on the challenging road to further understanding and modeling them. For instance, one can mention complex problems in fluid dynamics, climate dynamics, solid-earth geophysics, and many problems elsewhere in natural sciences where much of the discourse is still conceptual.
In atmospheric science, an atmospheric model is a mathematical model constructed around the full set of primitive, dynamical equations which govern atmospheric motions. It can supplement these equations with parameterizations for turbulent diffusion, radiation, moist processes, heat exchange, soil, vegetation, surface water, the kinematic effects of terrain, and convection. Most atmospheric models are numerical, i.e. they discretize equations of motion. They can predict microscale phenomena such as tornadoes and boundary layer eddies, sub-microscale turbulent flow over buildings, as well as synoptic and global flows. The horizontal domain of a model is either global, covering the entire Earth, or regional (limited-area), covering only part of the Earth. The different types of models run are thermotropic, barotropic, hydrostatic, and nonhydrostatic. Some of the model types make assumptions about the atmosphere which lengthens the time steps used and increases computational speed.
Carmen Nicole Moelders is an American atmospheric scientist. Her work is mainly focused on hydrometeorology, mesoscale meteorology, cloud physics, land-atmosphere interaction, air pollution, wildfire modeling, and wind power modeling.
A Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM) is a computer program that simulates shifts in potential vegetation and its associated biogeochemical and hydrological cycles as a response to shifts in climate. DGVMs use time series of climate data and, given constraints of latitude, topography, and soil characteristics, simulate monthly or daily dynamics of ecosystem processes. DGVMs are used most often to simulate the effects of future climate change on natural vegetation and its carbon and water cycles.
Eugenia Enriqueta Kalnay is an Argentine meteorologist and a Distinguished University Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park in the United States.
Roger M. Wakimoto is an atmospheric scientist specializing in research on mesoscale meteorology, particularly severe convective storms and radar meteorology. A former director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Wakimoto in November 2012 was appointed as assistant director of the Directorate for Geosciences (GEO) of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The Jule G. Charney Award is the American Meteorological Society's award granted to "individuals in recognition of highly significant research or development achievement in the atmospheric or hydrologic sciences". The prize was originally known as the Second Half Century Award, and first awarded to mark to fiftieth anniversary of the society.
Theodore Gordon Shepherd is the Grantham Professor of Climate Science at the University of Reading.
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.
CICE is a computer model that simulates the growth, melt and movement of sea ice. It has been integrated into many coupled climate system models as well as global ocean and weather forecasting models and is often used as a tool in Arctic and Southern Ocean research. CICE development began in the mid-1990s by the United States Department of Energy (DOE), and it is currently maintained and developed by a group of institutions in North America and Europe known as the CICE Consortium. Its widespread use in earth system science in part owes to the importance of sea ice in determining Earth's planetary albedo, the strength of the global thermohaline circulation in the world's oceans, and in providing surface boundary conditions for atmospheric circulation models, since sea ice occupies a significant proportion (4-6%) of earth's surface. CICE is a type of cryospheric model.
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.
Anne Ritger Douglass is atmospheric physicist known for her research on chlorinated compounds and the ozone layer.
Bette Otto-Bliesner is an earth scientist known for her modeling of Earth's past climate and its changes over different geological eras.
Paola Malanotte Rizzoli is a physical oceanographer known for her research on ocean circulation and sea level rise, especially with respect to flooding conditions in Venice.
Kerry Harrison Cook is an American climate scientist who is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the analysis of climate variability and change in the tropics using observational analysis and high-resolution numerical modeling. Specialties include the climate of Africa and the dynamics of intense tropical rainfall. She was elected Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 2009 and was awarded the Joanne Simpson Tropical Meteorology Research Award in 2021. She is the Chair of the American Meteorological Society's Climate Variability and Change Committee.