Research Overview
The Climate Dynamics and Modeling group aims to understand the processes that shape our climate and drive its variability and changes from synoptic to climatic timescales. The group focuses on tropical climate dynamics, extratropical regional hydroclimate and tropics-extratropics interactions. In the tropics, we are interested in atmosphere-ocean coupling and its role in the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and El Niño South Oscillation (ENSO) phenomena; in the extratropics, we investigate precipitation variability and changes in a number of regions such as North/South Americas and South Asia. We are particularly interested in how the tropics and extratropics affect each other—a teleconnection that provides climate predictability beyond a few seasons.
Our research approach combines observations and numerical models. Observations are used to analyze climate variability and changes and form hypotheses about the associated physics; these hypotheses can be tested either by different observations or by numerical experiments conducted with models. We use a wide range of models, from simple conceptual models that can be solved analytically with a pen and paper, to intermediate complexity models that can be solved on personal laptops, to climate models that can only be solved on supercomputers. We not only use models developed by others (such as NCAR, GFDL, etc.) but also develop our own models to achieve the goal of understanding the processes that shape our climate and drive its variability and changes.