The ocean helps set the pace of climate change and sea level rise, and what that means for a city like New York depends on multi-scale physics playing out across the globe. Alistair Adcroft builds the models used to make those projections. A computational oceanographer joining NYU Tandon, he works on how ocean circulation, melting ice, and small-scale turbulence are represented in the simulations that inform coastal risk. He is now applying machine learning throughout the modeling process, from sub-grid parameterization to whole-model emulation.
The hardest choices in climate modeling concern how to represent unresolved processes. Adcroft develops hybrid parameterizations that combine machine learning with known physics, alongside AI-based emulators that dramatically accelerate simulations and put previously infeasible questions within reach. He co-leads M2LInES, a multi-institutional effort bringing machine learning to coupled Earth system modeling. At Tandon he will help connect global projections to the local scales that matter for engineering decisions, including those for coastal and urban infrastructure.
He arrives from Princeton University, where he was a senior research oceanographer working closely with NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. There he led the team behind GFDL's OM4 ocean-ice model and co-created MOM6, now the primary ocean circulation model at NOAA and at centers across the United States and abroad. Earlier, at MIT, he was a lead developer of the MITgcm, a general circulation model still in wide use for both global simulation and process studies. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from Imperial College London and received the American Geophysical Union's Ocean Sciences Award in 2021.
Prof. Adcroft is recruiting Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers to work on ocean and climate modeling, machine learning for Earth system models, and bringing climate projections to the scales that engineering decisions require. Students from engineering, geoscience, applied mathematics, and data science backgrounds are all encouraged to get in touch.