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It is exciting to be in the field of atmospheric and oceanic science at this time. While it is certainly a mature field, increased computational resources are allowing us to answer new and more difficult questions. At the same time, there is plenty of theoretical work left to be done. In short, there are more questions than people to answer them! Currently I'm interested in the following topics:

The general circulation of the atmosphere
Climate variability on intraseasonal timescales
The use of stochastic processes in climate modeling
Stratospheric - tropospheric coupling
The role of moisture in the midlatitude circulation

Published work can be found here, to give you a feel for topics in which I've been interested.

Here are some of my collabolators and colleagues.


Joan Alexander (CoRA)
Mark Baldwin (NWRA)
Dargan Frierson (Washington)
Isaac Held (Princeton/GFDL)
Paul Kushner (Toronto)
Lorenzo Polvani (Columbia)
Seok-Woo Son (McGill)
Geoff Vallis (Princeton/GFDL)
Darryn Waugh (Johns Hopkins)

The Research Group

My research group at NYU is starting to bear fruit. I'm always looking for a few good men and women, both prospective graduate students and undegraduates looking for summer and academic year research.

Group members
Naftali Cohen (PhD Student)
Ho Yeung (Jacob) Hung (PhD Student)
Xichen Li (PhD Student)
Changhyun Yoo (Postdoc)

Past group members
Kelly Sielert (undergraduate)
Clement Chan (undergraduate)
Michael Hirsch (undergraduate)

Climate Models

The principle tool thats I use to understand the atmosphere are numerical models of the atmospheric circulation. Much of my research is done with global models of the primitive equations, which are a simplification of the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid motion appropriate for the large scale circulation of the Earth's atmosphere. These models are known as "dynamical cores," as they form the core of full climate models. They allow us to explore the large scale dynamics of the atmosphere. More complex models of the atmospheric circulation simulate and/or parameterize the thermodynamic and dissipative processes that determine our climate. This page describes some of the models we have running here at NYU. They were developed by scientist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton.