About

Julien Emile-Geay
Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences

Contact Information
Office: ZHS 275
Phone: (213) 740-2945
E-mail: julieneg@usc.edu

LINKS
Curriculum Vitae
Personal Website
 

Biographical Sketch
My path in this field is like most. I did not choose climate ; it chose me. I stumbled into it when I was 21 and it has stuck. It strikes an ideal blend of mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and social sciences. I am rather convinced that climate change is the greatest scientific issue of our time - if you feel the same, there are many opportunities to study it at USC.
 

Education
B.S. Earth Sciences, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 1999
M.S. Dynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 2001
Ph.D. Climate Dynamics, Columbia University, 2006
 

Postdoctoral Training
Post-doctoral Fellow, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-2008   
 

Description of Research

Summary Statement of Research Interests
My research is primarily concerned with the role of the Tropics in long term climate variability. The central actor of this game is of course the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, whose behavior I strive to understand on decadal to millennial timescales. Currently, this entails:

1) Reconstructing surface temperature conditions over the past 2 millennia, with a joint emphasis on proxy quality and the development of adequate statistical and timeseries analysis methods. This work is at the interface between applied mathematics and climatology.

2) Understanding and representing uncertainties in climate proxy records (by forward modeling the geological processes giving rise to such geochemical timeseries). This work is at the interface between applied geochemistry and climatology.

3) Modelling tropical climate over the past millennium, using an array of climate models with varying degrees of complexity. I am particularly interested in the climate sensitivity to natural (solar and volcanic) forcing and what it teaches us (or not) about climate sensitivity to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

4) Finally, I have a long-standing interest in the dynamical ocean response to geothermal heatflow. This work makes use of numerical models of the ocean (NEMO) and geochemical tracers that help constrain the patterns and intensity of the deep circulation, and its potential impact on millennial-scale climate change.
 

Research Keywords
ocean dynamics, atmospheric dynamics, climate dynamics, El Niño, last millennium, Hockey Stick, statistical climatology
 

New Courses Developed
Data Analysis in the Earth & Environmental Sciences, Earth Sciences, Introduction to mathematical methods giving insight into Earth and Environmental data. Topics include : probability & statistics, timeseries analysis, spectral analysis, inverse theory, interpolation. (co-taught with Thorsten Becker)., Fall 2009   
 
 
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