John M. Wallace
University of Washington
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Primary Section: 16, Geophysics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1997)
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Research Interests
My research and that of my students has been directed at improving our understanding of global climate and its year-to-year and decade-to-decade variations, making use of observational data. We have contributed to the identification and understanding of a number of atmospheric phenomena, including the vertically propagating planetary waves that drive the quasi-biennial oscillation in zonal winds in the equatorial stratosphere, the 4-5-day period easterly waves that modulate daily rainfall over the tropical oceans, and the dominant spatial patterns in month-to-month and year-to-year climate variability, including the one through which the El Nino phenomenon in the tropical Pacific influences climate over North America. We have also contributed to the methodology for isolating systematic space-time patterns in noisy geophysical data. We are presently attempting to assess the extent to which human activities are contributing to recent climatic trends such as the pronounced wintertime warming over Russia and Alaska.
