CGCS Directory

Dr. Patrick Heimbach

Former Senior Research Scientist, EAPS
Alumni

Affiliations

EAPS, CMI, CGCS

Research Interests:
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 global ocean circulation and sea ice cover. 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. I act as a co-chair of a recently formed U.S. CLIVAR working group on Greenland Ice Sheet-Ocean Interactions (GRISO).

Contact Information

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w: http://heimbach.wordpress.com/

Education

Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.), Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany, 1998
M.Sc. (Dipl. Phys.), University of Bonn, Germany, 1993