Climate Sciences

Climate varies across time and space, shaped by natural variability, extreme events, and long-term change operating across the Earth system. This variability emerges from complex, nonlinear interactions among the atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere, biosphere, land surface, and human activity, linking physical climate processes to environmental and biogeochemical systems. Climate science seeks to understand these interactions and feedbacks, and to quantify how the climate system responds to external forcings, both natural and anthropogenic. Research in the department approaches climate science through an integrative framework that combines observations, climate models, field measurements, and laboratory experiments to investigate climate dynamics, atmospheric and oceanic processes, and coupled climate-biogeochemical feedbacks across scales. This work addresses how climate change influences greenhouse gas cycles, ocean chemistry, and marine ecosystems, and how these environmental responses, in turn, feed back on the climate system, contributing to a deeper understanding of past, present, and future climate change.