Edward and Bertha Rose Professor of Environmental Physics
My research uses physical modeling, nonlinear dynamics, stochastic processes, network theory, and statistical analysis to study climate variability, geophysical records, oceans, aeolian landscapes, earthquakes, and planetary environments. The common thread is simple: complex natural systems often reveal order through scaling, memory, thresholds, and interactions across many time and space scales.
Climate variability involves nonlinear interactions among the atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere, and biosphere. Recent work uses climate-network approaches to study El Nino teleconnections, tropical climate components, air-pollution links, and early-warning structure in complex environmental data.
Related papers: Forecasting El Nino, climate network percolation, network approaches to climate science
Ice ages, abrupt climate change, and Snowball Earth episodes provide natural laboratories for testing how thresholds, feedbacks, and ocean circulation can reorganize the climate system. This work combines simple models with broader geophysical constraints.
Related papers: Snowball ocean variability, Cryogenian geology-geobiology, past climate dynamics
Ocean circulation, ice dynamics, and rotation couple strongly on Earth and on icy moons. Projects include Eastern Mediterranean circulation, deep-water formation, wind-driven ocean-current statistics, Europa ice flow, and ocean-current driven rotation of Europa's shell.
Related papers: Europa non-synchronous rotation, Europa icy shell flow, Eastern Mediterranean currents
Aeolian landscapes are shaped by wind, vegetation, biological crusts, albedo feedbacks, and transport thresholds. The work ranges from barchan-parabolic dune bistability to vegetation-biocrust dynamics and scaling laws for sand drift potential.
Related papers: barchan and parabolic dunes, sand drift potential, aeolian megaripples
Many environmental records contain long memory, intermittency, and clustered fluctuations. I study these signatures in river flow, rainfall, earthquakes, surface winds, and other geophysical series using statistical physics and data-driven methods.
Related papers: annual rain distributions, earthquake memory, surface wind and current speeds
The full bibliography is maintained on the publications page.