PAOC Spotlights

Past Faculty:

Edward Norton Lorenz (May 23, 1917 – April 16, 2008) 
Lorenz was a mathematician and meteorologist, and a pioneer of chaos theory. He discovered the notion of strange attractors and coined the term butterfly effect. [read more at MIT News]
Ed Lorenz's publications

Fred Sanders (May 17, 1923 - October 6, 2006)
Sanders was pre-eminent in the field of synoptic meteorology and made important contributions to the analysis, understanding, and prediction of fronts, low pressure systems, hurricanes, squall lines, and flood-producing storms, and he coined the term "bomb" to describe explosively intensifying winter storms. [read more at MIT News]
Fred Sanders publications

Professors Emeritus:

Richard Lindzen

Richard Lindzen is known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides and ozone photochemistry. During a career spanning over 30 years, he has published more than 200 scientific papers and books and was a lead author of Chapter 7, 'Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks,' of the IPCC Third Assessment Report on climate change. He is a well known skeptic concerning catastrophic global warming and a vocal critic of what he states are political pressures on climate scientists to conform to what he has called climate alarmism.  He was educated at Harvard (Ph.D., '64 - advised by R.M. Goody - S.M., '61, A.B., '60), moving to MIT in 1983, having held positions at the University of Washington (1964–1965), Institute for Theoretical Meteorology, University of Oslo (1965–1966), National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) (1966–1967), University of Chicago (1968–1972) and Harvard University (1972–1983). He also briefly held a position of Visiting Lecturer at UCLA in 1967. He is the author of a standard textbook on atmospheric dynamics Dynamics of Atmospheric Physics, and co-author of the monograph Atmospheric Tides. His Ph.D, (Harvard, 1965, advisor R.M. Goody) was titled Radiative and photochemical processes in strato- and mesospheric dynamics. Among his EAPS students are Daniel Kirk-Davidoff (Ph.D. MIT 1991), now Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, and Gerard Roe (Ph.D. MIT 1999) currently Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Washington. Lindzen received the AGU's Macelwane Medal, and the AMS's Charney Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Publications Record (Science Citation Index, 1965-)

Peter Stone
Peter Stone is one of the world's foremost atmospheric dynamicists and climate scientists. His work ranges over a broad span of subjects, from the dynamics of baroclinic waves, to the circulation of planetary atmospheres, to the physics of earth's climate. 
Peter Stone's publications

Carl Wunsch

Carl Wunsch whos degrees are all from MIT (mathematics and geophysics)  has spent his entire professional career here though interspersed with two year-long sabbaticals at Cambridge (Dept. of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics) and others at  University College London, the Oceanography Centre in Southampton, GRGS-Toulouse, Harvard University, and was George Eastman Visiting Professor and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.

Wunsch has worked on many aspects of physical oceanography and its climate implications, with emphasis on observations of all types, including the global-scale,  using satellites and acoustic tomographic, and various conventional observation methods. Early in his career, he spent many months working at sea. He was an organizer of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, chaired the science committees leading to the flight of altimetric satellites,  and  is deeply involved in the analysis of the oceanic general circulation and its climate influences including aspects such as sea level change, and the interpretation of the paleoceanographic record. His interests exploit mathematical methods such as inverse theory and state estimation for understanding of the ocean circulation and climate.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society,  American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society and has received a number of awards including the Bowie Medal of the American Geophysical Union, 2006 and the Prince Albert 1st Medal. Prof. Wunsch is the author or co-author of about 250 scientific papers and the author of several  books including, Ocean Acoustic Tomography  (with W. Munk and P. Worcester); The Ocean Circulation Inverse Problem; and Discrete Inverse and State Estimation Problems, all with Cambridge.

His Ph.D. advisor was Henry Stommel.

Publications Record (Science Citation Index, 1973-)