Jonathan Lauderdale

MOcean, University of Southampton, UK, 2006, PhD, University of Southampton, UK, 2011

I am a physical oceanographer and ocean biogeochemical modeller intrigued by the mechanisms through which the ocean can alter Earth's climate and atmospheric CO2 concentration both in the past and under future anthropogenic changes. My focus has, so far, been on high latitude regions, particularly the Southern Ocean. I use global coarse resolution numerical models of ocean circulation coupled to simplified biogeochemistry routines, but I also exploit composite tracers to reveal how different components of carbon and nutrient cycles operate. This is the basis of my current research at MIT to look at the causes of air-sea fluxes of CO2, for example due to photosynthesis by phytoplankton or changes in temperature and salinity of waters in the mixed layer. Here is a description of my research using the ten-hundred most common words (http://tinyurl.com/jml-research-ten-hundred-words). Just before arriving at MIT, I spent a few interesting months analyzing the output of a disease model of the climatic suitability for malaria transmission in the Indian subcontinent driven by a seasonal meteorological forecast. We find moderate skill in forecasts for the last ~30 years, so potentially this could afford health planners several months notice of a possible epidemic outbreak. Research from our group was covered in the Times of India (http://goo.gl/Owp1bm) and the Guardian (http://goo.gl/JxUlu5).

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