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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
EAPS, Room 54-1518, (“Green Building”)
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
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Phone: +1-617-253-5259
Fax: +1-617-253-4464
Email: heimbach@mit.edu
Skype: patrick.heimbach

I work in the physical oceanography group in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), and am affiliated with MIT’s Climate Modeling Initiative (CMI) and the Center for Computational Engineering (CCE). I did my Ph.D. at the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.

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 (the 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 ocean. The project got underway in 1998 at which point the San Diego Supercomputing Center’s (SDSC) EnVision magazine featured a story, entitled “Forecasts for the Weather of the Earth’s Oceans”. Also check out this recent news story “NASA Supercomputing Goes Green: Modeling Earth’s Ocean” on ECCO’s use of NASA’s advanced supercomputing (NAS) facilities at NASA/ARC.

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 fully-fledged thermodynamic/dynamic sea ice model to improve our simulations of high-latitude processes in the Arctic and the Southern Ocean. Furthermore, we are investigating the polar ice sheets and their mass balance. Greenland and Antarctica combined, contain water in frozen form amounting to roughly 77m in global sea level equivalent.