Researcher's Profile

September 1991	Ph. D., Department of Geophysics, Tohoku University
September 1991	Visiting Scientist, Princeton University
August 1993	Research Associate, University of Washington
April 1994	Associate Professor, Hokkaido University, Japan
October 1999	Associate Professor, International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii
August 2002	Professor, International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii
November 2012	Professor, Roger Revelle Chair in Environmental Science, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego
July 2016	Fellow, RCAST, The University of Tokyo

　 　

My research centers on ocean-atmosphere interactions and their role in climate formation, variability, and change. The ocean's importance for climate is evident from the facts that most of solar radiation absorption occurs at the Earth surface and that the ocean occupies seventy percent of the Earth surface. Examples of ocean-atmosphere interaction effects are abundant, including the spontaneous generation of El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and the northward-displaced tropical rain band called the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) in the eastern Pacific and Atlantic. My research contributes to answering such fundamental questions as what determines the spatial distributions of climate, why it varies in time, how preferred patterns of climate variability form, and how predictable climate is.
I carry out both diagnostic and modeling studies, using observations and numerical models of the ocean, atmosphere, and their coupled system. Geographically, my work covers all three major oceans of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian, and monsoons of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Our research has led to the formulation of wind-evaporation-sea surface temperature (WES) feedback mechanism and the Indian Ocean capacitor effect, the "warmer-get-wetter" idea for rainfall change in global warming, and the discovery of what Science magazine called "the longest island wake of the world". The WES feedback is important for the northward displacement of the ITCZ and the tropical meridional mode.