Patrick Heimbach

I work in the physical oceanography group in MIT‘s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), and am affiliated with MIT’s Climate Modeling Initiative (CMI) , the Center for Global Change Science (CGCS), the Center for Computational Engineering (CCE), the Program in Atmosphere, Ocean and Climate (PAOC), and the Program in Computation for Design and Optimization (CDO). I did my Ph.D. at the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.

My main interest is understanding the general circulation of the ocean and its role in the global climate system. As part of the Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) consortium we are bringing together a state-of-the-art general circulation model (MITgcm) with most of the available satellite and in-situ observations to produce a best possible estimate of the time-evolving three-dimensional state of the ocean.

I’ve also become interested in the cryosphere, in particular in the dynamics of sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers. We are coupling the MITgcm to a thermodynamic/dynamic sea ice model to improve our simulations of processes in the Arctic and the Southern Ocean. Furthermore, we are investigating the polar ice sheets, their dynamics, their interaction with the ocean, and their contributions to sea level rise.