Dr. Kirtman’s research is a wide-ranging program designed to understand and quantify the limits of climate predictability from days to decades. His research also involves understanding how the climate will change in response to changes in anthropogenic (e.g., greenhouse gases) and natural (e.g., volcanoes) forcing. This research involves hypothesis testing numerical experiments, using sophisticated state-of-the-art climate models and experimental realtime prediction. His group uses and has access to a suite of climate models, climate data, and high-performance computational platforms.
Kirtman also is the director of the UM/NOAA Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies and program director for Climate and Environmental Hazards at UM's Center for Computational Science. He is co-chair of the NOAA Climate Prediction Task Force and a member of the NOAA Climate and Global Change PostDoctoral Fellows hip committee. Internationally, he has enjoyed a leadership role in the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) seasonal to interannual prediction activities and has chaired the International CLIVAR Working Group on Seasonal to lnterannual Prediction (WGSIP), and the WCRP Task Force for Seasonal Prediction (TFSP). Kirtman was a coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) working group one, the Scientific Basis.
