Professor Vuille Home Page
Associate Professor
Office: ES 311
Phone: (518) 442-4472
Fax: (518) 442-5825
Email: mathias@atmos.albany.edu
1991 M.S., University of Bern
1995 Ph.D., University of Bern
1996-99 Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Massachusetts
2000-04 Research Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts
2004-07 Research Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts
My research interests are in past, current and future
climate change in the tropics. I am particularly interested in trying to bridge
the gap between modern climate dynamics studies and paleoclimatic
interpretation of proxy data. Therefore my research is very interdisciplinary
in nature and often forms part of larger international collaborative programs. In
my research I tend to focus on two regions in particular: the tropical and
subtropical Andes in South America and the mountains of East Africa. In both
locations a wealth of paleoclimatic information is available from a large
number of natural archives, but the understanding of their climatic sensitivity
is often inadequate. Some of the most important natural archives are based on stable
isotopic proxies (e.g. tropical ice cores, speleothems or biomarkers in lake
sediments), but it is often not clear what these proxies really record and what
their climatic sensitivities are in both the time- and space domain. I try to
investigate how these sensitivities may change in time as boundary conditions
change and if lessons learned from climate studies on interannual to
interdecadal timescales can be used in the interpretation of centennial to
millennial scale climate variability recorded in these proxies. To answer some
of these questions I employ both observational data (in-situ measurements,
reanalysis, radiosonde and satellite data) and models of varying complexity
(GCMs, RCMs and isotopic models). In the past this research has been funded
through grants from NSF (Earth System History, Paleoclimate and Climate
Dynamics) and NOAA (Climate Change Data and Detection, CCDD).
I also maintain an active research program studying the causes,
impacts and scenarios of future climate change in the tropical Andes, where the
retreat of glaciers may soon pose a threat for the regional water supply. I
employ regional climate models (RCMs) over the tropical Andes to study how
glacier extent and runoff from glacierized catchments will change under
different scenarios as predicted in the IPCC-SRES (Special Report on Emissions
Scenarios). This research is funded through NSF (co-funded by Hydrology and
Climate Dynamics Divisions) and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change
Research (IAI). I am also collaborating with the Latin America Division of the
Word Bank, which has a particular interest in this kind of research and funding
through the Global Environmental Fund (GEF) to implement adaptation measures in
several Andean countries.
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