Research Interests

• Connecting physical oceanography and climate dynamics
• Leveraging paleoceanographic and historical instrumental data to understand the 20th and 21st centuries
• Estimating past ocean circulation and its role in paleoclimate using physical models and biogeochemical records.
• Analyzing climate variability through state estimation, especially the synthesis of general circulation models and observations.

How did we get here? Before tackling what the climate of the 21st Century will look like, we have very little data that actually tells us how ocean properties came to look the way they do. Large changes have occurred since the Little Ice Age over the last few hundred years, and before that, even larger changes occurred at the end of the Last Ice Age over the last 20,000 years. My focus is to combine the best observations from the instrumental record as well as paleoceanographic archives to reconstruct the evolution of the climate-relevant properties of heat and carbon leading up to the present day. Due to the lack of observations over decadal to millennial timescales, I use inverse methods to combine physical/biogeochemical models and the data records. Basic questions remain unanswered. Where did the CO2 in today's atmosphere come from? How are the alternating warm and cool periods of the distant past still affecting the ocean today? Past climate reconstructions ultimately will inform our understanding of the future climate of the 21st Century and beyond.