Alexey Fedorov

I received my Ph.D. at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego. After graduation I worked at Princeton University and  GFDL  (Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab) as a postdoctoral researcher and then a research scientist. At Yale, I lead Ocean, Atmosphere and Climate Modeling group in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. I also collaborate with   Laboratoire D’Oceanographie Et Du Climat  Experimentations  Et Approches  Numeriques (LOCEAN) of the Sorbonne University  where I am a Senior Visiting Scientist.

Over the years, I was awarded the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2007-2014) to investigate the effect of climate change on El Nino and the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018) to study ocean circulation in warm climates. More recently (2019) I received the Presidential climate change research award of the “Make our planet great again” program initiated by French President Emmanuel Macron.

My work advances our knowledge of ocean, atmospheric and climate dynamics in the contexts of contemporary global warming and past climate changes. I am particularly interested in oceanic and atmospheric general circulations, ocean-atmosphere interactions, the ocean’s role in climate, and climate variability on time scales from decades to centuries and thousands of years.

Many problems I study are related to tropical climate dynamics, such as El Niño, the atmospheric Walker circulation, the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), the Madden-Julian oscillation, tropical cyclones, tropical clouds and global warming.

Other problems are related to the North Atlantic climate and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), including AMOC stability and response to global warming; AMOC impacts,  Arctic-North Atlantic links;  Indian Ocean-North Atlantic links; abrupt climate change; decadal and longer climate variability.

I also study anthropogenic climate change and climate sensitivity, warm climates of the past (e.g. Pliocene), and many other problems of climate dynamics.

These problems interwine several disciplines such as physical oceanography, geophysical fluid dynamics, atmospheric sciences, paleoclimate, and numerical modeling. I use a hierarchy of approaches, including simulations with state-of-the-art ocean, atmospheric or climate models (GCMs), advanced theoretical methods, analysis of observations, and conceptual ocean and climate models. The ultimate goal is to understand physical processes that control climate dynamics and to improve climate prediction. 

At a Packard fellows annual meeting:

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In Paris during a CLIVAR El Nino workshop (2015):

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Using geology to motivate climate modeling: 

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Doing physical oceanography as a student: