Patrick Heimbach

Short Bio

Patrick Heimbach is Professor and W. A. “Tex” Moncrief, Jr., chair III in Simulation-Based Engineering and Sciences in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, with joint appointments in the Jackson School of Geosciences, the Institute for Geophysics, and the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. Previously, he worked for 16 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Patrick earned his Ph.D. in Geosciences in 1998 from the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology and the University of Hamburg, Germany, working with Prof. Klaus Hasselmann.

Patrick’s main research interest is understanding the general circulation of the ocean and its role in the global climate system. He is an expert on the use of inverse methods applied to Earth system model parameter and state estimation. Emerging research foci are understanding the dynamics of sea level change, the provision of formal uncertainties along with these estimates and improving the global ocean observing system for climate. Patrick has also become interested in the cryosphere. His group is improving simulations of coupled sea ice-ocean dynamics in the Arctic. Furthermore, he investigates the polar ice sheets, their dynamics, their interaction with the ocean, and their contributions to sea level change.

Among his professional activities, Patrick has served on the National Academy of Sciences’ Ocean Studies Board, and on the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committees for the Office of Polar Programs and the Office for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. He is a member of NASA’s Sea Level Change Science Team, the US CLIVAR Ocean Uncertainty Quantification working group, the CliC/CLIVAR Northern Ocean Regional Panel, the WMO OceanPredict Science Team, and the WCRP Lighthouse Activity on Explaining and Predicting Earth System Change. Patrick is co-founder and co-organizer of the Norway-led Advanced Climate Dynamics Courses (ACDC), held annually since 2009.