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Climate Process Studies

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In order to understand how human society may be influencing global climate, we must understand the physical and biological mechanisms that influence climate on regional to global scales. ESI members are studying climate mechanisms that range from plant physiology to plate tectonics to deforestation.

Image: Vegetation influences global climate by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converting it to materials like leaves and wood. UT climate modelers are trying to assess the relative importance of these and other human caused impacts on global climate. This reads as though vegetation is a human caused impact.

 

 

Process Studies Reseach

Charles Jackson
Research Associate
http://www.ig.utexas.edu/people/staff/charles/index.htm

Research Interests: Dr. Jackson's research interests have the goal of distilling lessons from the history of climate for the purpose of advancing our understanding of the physics of the atmosphere, ocean, and cryosphere and their coupling.

Larry Lawver
Research Scientist
http://www.ig.utexas.edu/people/staff/lawver/index.htm

Research Interests: Dr. Lawver is interested in climate over very long time scales, especially in how the global configuration of tectonic plates affects global meteorology, ocean circulation, and tectonic processes over periods of tens to hundreds of millions of years.

Marcy Litvak
Assistant Professor, Plant Physiological Ecology
http://www.biosci.utexas.edu/IB/faculty/LITVAK.HTM

Research Interests: Research focuses on the physiological and ecological controls over the exchange of carbon, water and energy between plants and the atmosphere at scales that range from the leaf-level to the ecosystem-level. Current research is on controls over carbon fluxes in the boreal forest following disturbance, and factors influencing carbon, water and nutrient exchange in Texas ecosystems.

Jeff Paine
Research Scientist
http://www.beg.utexas.edu/staffinfo/paine01.htm

Research Interests: Environmental geophysics, climate change, coastal studies. Recent studies: Geophysical investigations of salinization; environmental applications of shallow seismic techniques; airborne electromagnetic investigations Lower Rio Grande Valley.

Robert B. Scott
Research Associate
http://www.ig.utexas.edu/people/staff/rscott/index.htm

Research Interests: Dr. Scott uses theory, observations, and analytical and numerical models to pursue research in large scale ocean dynamics and climate dynamics. He is interested in theory insofar as it makes predictions that can be observed. Some questions he is interested in are: what aspects of two-dimensional turbulence are present in the real ocean; what drives interannual and longer timescale climate variability;and what data analysis tools are best used to reveal mechanisms of variability.

Liang Yang
Assistant Professor
http://www.geo.utexas.edu/climate

Research Interests: Dr. Yang's current research interests include: Global Change; Climate Modeling; Land-Surface Modeling; Snow Hydrology; Runoff; North American Monsoon; Tropical Deforestation; Interaction of Terrestrial and Atmospheric Hydrological Processes; Flood and Drought; Remote Sensing.