Dr Dietmar Dommenget

Full description

Dr Dietmar Dommenget completed his Diploma in Physics at the University of Hamburg. He started studying climate dynamics and climate model development at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in 1996 and finished his PhD in 2000. He joined the ECCO (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean) project in a postdoctoral position at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, to study the predictability of El Niño in a joint observational data assimilation scheme. After three years in California he returned to Germany in 2003 for a fixed-term faculty position as a junior professor in the Meteorology department at the IFM-GEOMAR (also known as the Liebniz Institute of Marine Sciences) in Kiel. Since 2010 Dr Dommenget has been Senior Lecturer at Monash University in the Weather and Climate group of the School of Mathematical Sciences.

Dr Dommenget’s research focuses on large-scale climate dynamics. He works with climate models at all levels of complexity. Most of his work centres on the development, conducting and analysis of coupled general-circulation models, but he has also developed simple conceptual models of natural climate variability. Most of his work focuses on sea surface temperature variability in the tropical and extra-tropical oceans. He is most widely known for his work on the interpretation of statistical patterns in climate variability. His most recent projects focus on climate change. He developed a new type of climate model for the conceptual understanding of the climate response to external forcing, which is a fast and simple tool for researchers, students and the public to understand the interactions in the climate system.