Professor Dr. Patrick Heimbach

Biography

Patrick Heimbach is a Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also holds joint appointments at the Jackson School of Geosciences and the Institute for Geophysics. He holds the W. 'Tex' Moncrief, Jr. Endowed Chair III in Simulation-Based Engineering Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. in 1998 from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, working on global ocean surface wave remote sensing modeling under the supervision of Klaus Hasselmann. His research primarily revolves around the understanding of general circulation and its role in the global climate system. Heimbach is actively involved in the ECCO (Estimating Circulation and Climate of the Ocean) consortium, applying inverse methods to fit general circulation models to observations, thus producing optimal estimates of the evolving state of the global ocean and sea ice over the past decades. His group also focuses on the dynamics of sea level change and the interaction of ocean and polar ice sheets, with a particular emphasis on understanding the contributions of these dynamics to sea level rise. He has extensive experience in developing and maintaining numerical codes for ocean modeling and is involved in numerous professional services related to ocean studies, climate, and polar programs.

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