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Joellen Russell

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Joellen Russell
Born
Joellen Louise Russell

1970 (age 54–55)
Seattle, WA
Education
Occupation(s)Oceanographer, climate scientist

Joellen Louise Russell (born 1970) is an American oceanographer and climate scientist.[1]

Russell is a Distinguished Professor and the current Department Head of the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arizona[2] in Tucson, AZ. She has joint appointments in the Departments of Lunar and Planetary Sciences, Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences, and in the Mathematics Department’s Program in Applied Mathematics. In 2017, she was named as the Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair of Integrative Science.[3] Russell is the current US Executive Committee member of the International Association of the Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO).[4] She is one of the founding members of Science Moms.

Early life and education

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Russell was born in Seattle, WA in 1970, and grew up in Kotzebue, Alaska, a fishing village 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where her father worked for the Indian Health Service. At age 12, she knew she wanted to be an oceanographer. Russell attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH, received a School Year Abroad in Rennes, France, and was a Radcliffe National Scholar at Harvard University, where she earned an A.B. in Environmental Geoscience. She had her first research cruise to the Southern Ocean in 1994, and spent nearly a year of her graduate career at sea before completing her PhD in Oceanography in 1999 from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. She earned a JISAO Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Washington, and then spent several years as a research scientist at Princeton University and the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, NJ during the preparation for the 4th Assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR4). Russell became a member of the faculty of the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arizona in 2006, and became a full professor in 2019. She began serving as the Department Head in August 2023.

Career and impact of research

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Russell’s research[5] explores the role of the ocean in the global climate,[6] focusing on the Southern Ocean[7] and the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds. She uses robot floats, supercomputers, and satellites[8] to study the Southern Ocean and the ocean’s role in the transient global climate. Russell uses earth system models[9] to simulate the climate and carbon cycle of the past, the present, and the future, and develops observationally-based metrics to evaluate these simulations.[10] Russell's work on the westerly winds led to her greatest research accomplishment so far: the creation of a new paradigm in climate science, namely that warmer climates produce stronger westerly winds.[11] This insight solved one of the long-standing climate paradoxes, the mechanism responsible for transferring one-third of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into the ocean and then back out again during our repeated glacial-interglacial cycles.[12] More recently, Russell and her glaciologist colleagues have published a mechanism, called the "Zealandia Switch" through which a change in the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds can initiate a "big, fast, and global" transition and explain the synchronous glacial retreat in New Zealand, North America, the European Alps and Patagonia during the same 200 yr interval at the end of the last ice age.[13]

Russell is the lead for the modeling theme of the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling project (SOCCOM)[14] including its Southern Ocean Model Intercomparison Project (SOMIP).[15] She is the current US Executive Committee member of the International Association of the Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO). Previously, she served as the chair of the NOAA Science Advisory Board’s Climate Working Group,[16] as an Objective Leader[17] for the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research’s AntarcticClimate21,[18] and on the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Earth System Model (CESM) advisory board.[19]

Impact

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Russell is one of the 14 climate scientists behind an amicus curiae brief supporting the plaintiff in the historic 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision on carbon dioxide emissions and climate change, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, et al. v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This amicus brief[20] was the only one cited in this landmark decision that established that carbon dioxide is an atmospheric pollutant and that the EPA must regulate it.

In 2020, Russell and Dr. Katherine Hayhoe founded Science Moms, a nonpartisan group of climate scientists, who are also mothers, working to demystify climate change.[21]

Awards and recognition

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  • 2024: Invited Lead Keynote, GreenAccord Cultural Association’s XVI International Media Forum on the Safeguard of Nature: Building Future Together, Frascati, Italy[22]
  • 2024: Invited Speaker, National Science Foundation: Division of Ocean Sciences, “Frontiers in Ocean Sciences Symposium”[23]
  • 2023: US Fulbright Scholar (working at the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in Wellington, New Zealand)
  • 2021: University Distinguished Professor, University of Arizona
  • 2017 – present: Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair of Integrative Science[24]
  • 2014 – 1885: Society Distinguished Scholar Award, University of Arizona[25][26]
  • 2012 – present: Member, Comer Family Foundation “Changelings” group[27]
  • 2011 – 2012: Distinguished Lecturer, American Association of Petroleum Geologists[28]
  • 2010: Provost’s General Education Teaching Award, University of Arizona[29]
  • 1989 – 1993: Radcliffe National Scholar, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

References

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  1. ^ "Joellen Russell". Joellen Russell. Retrieved October 30, 2021.
  2. ^ "Melting Antarctic Ice Sheets Have Made Southern Ocean More Acidic, Warmer". AZoCleantech.com. January 8, 2020. Retrieved March 28, 2020.
  3. ^ "Honor for Scientist Joellen Russell". UANews. March 28, 2020. Archived from the original on March 28, 2020. Retrieved March 28, 2020.
  4. ^ "IAPSO – Executive Bureau and Executive Committeee". iapso-ocean.org. Retrieved April 9, 2025.
  5. ^ "The World's Best Natural Defense Against Climate Change May Soon Make Things Worse". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved April 14, 2020.
  6. ^ Russell, Joellen (March 13, 2018). "Ocean sensors can track progress on climate goals". Nature. 555 (7696): 287. Bibcode:2018Natur.555..287R. doi:10.1038/d41586-018-03068-w. PMID 29542704.
  7. ^ "2. The Southern Ocean Has Been Hit Worst". EcoWatch. January 29, 2020. Archived from the original on March 28, 2020. Retrieved March 28, 2020.
  8. ^ "UArizona oceanographer shares expertise during National Ocean Month | University of Arizona News". news.arizona.edu. Retrieved April 8, 2025.
  9. ^ Eyring, Veronika; Cox, Peter M.; Flato, Gregory M.; Gleckler, Peter J.; Abramowitz, Gab; Caldwell, Peter; Collins, William D.; Gier, Bettina K.; Hall, Alex D.; Hoffman, Forrest M.; Hurtt, George C. (February 2019). "Taking climate model evaluation to the next level". Nature Climate Change. 9 (2): 102–110. Bibcode:2019NatCC...9..102E. doi:10.1038/s41558-018-0355-y. hdl:20.500.11850/323491. ISSN 1758-6798. S2CID 92281759.
  10. ^ Russell, Joellen L.; Kamenkovich, Igor; Bitz, Cecilia; Ferrari, Raffaele; Gille, Sarah T.; Goodman, Paul J.; Hallberg, Robert; Johnson, Kenneth; Khazmutdinova, Karina; Marinov, Irina; Mazloff, Matthew (2018). "Metrics for the Evaluation of the Southern Ocean in Coupled Climate Models and Earth System Models". Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans. 123 (5): 3120–3143. Bibcode:2018JGRC..123.3120R. doi:10.1002/2017JC013461. hdl:10150/629146. ISSN 2169-9291.
  11. ^ Toggweiler, J. R.; Russell, Joellen (2008). "Ocean circulation in a warming climate". Nature. 451 (7176): 286–288. Bibcode:2008Natur.451..286T. doi:10.1038/nature06590. ISSN 1476-4687. PMID 18202645.
  12. ^ Toggweiler, J. R.; Russell, Joellen L.; Carson, S. R. (2006). "Midlatitude westerlies, atmospheric CO 2 , and climate change during the ice ages: WESTERLIES AND CO 2 DURING THE ICE AGES". Paleoceanography. 21 (2): n/a. doi:10.1029/2005PA001154.
  13. ^ Denton, George H.; Putnam, Aaron E.; Russell, Joellen L.; Barrell, David J. A.; Schaefer, Joerg M.; Kaplan, Michael R.; Strand, Peter D. (April 1, 2021). "The Zealandia Switch: Ice age climate shifts viewed from Southern Hemisphere moraines". Quaternary Science Reviews. 257: 106771. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2020.106771. ISSN 0277-3791.
  14. ^ Bruess, Ellen (October 16, 2019). "4,000 floating robots take on climate change". Medill Reports Chicago. Retrieved March 28, 2020.
  15. ^ "Melting Antarctic ice could slow global temperature rise, study says". Carbon Brief. November 19, 2018. Retrieved March 28, 2020.
  16. ^ Frank, Thomas. "Ocean Acidification Threatens the U.S. Economy". Scientific American. Retrieved March 28, 2020.
  17. ^ Nash, Rosemary. "AntClim21 Members". SCAR. Retrieved April 13, 2020.
  18. ^ Nash, Rosemary. "Antarctic Climate Change in the 21st Century (AntClim21)". SCAR. Archived from the original on July 27, 2020. Retrieved April 13, 2020.
  19. ^ "CESM Administration Board". www.cesm.ucar.edu. Retrieved April 13, 2020.
  20. ^ "Search – Supreme Court of the United States". www.supremecourt.gov. Retrieved March 28, 2020.
  21. ^ "The Moms Who Are Battling Climate Change". The New Yorker. April 12, 2021. Retrieved August 9, 2021.
  22. ^ "XVI INTERNATIONAL FORUM: INFORMATION ON THE SAFEGUARDING OF NATURE – Greenaccord" (in Italian). Retrieved April 8, 2025.
  23. ^ "Frontiers in Ocean Sciences Symposium | NSF – National Science Foundation". www.nsf.gov. August 13, 2024. Retrieved April 8, 2025.
  24. ^ "UA Endowed Chairs and Professors". Thomas R. Brown Foundations. Retrieved April 13, 2020.
  25. ^ "Distinguished Scholars | UA Faculty Affairs". facultyaffairs.arizona.edu. Retrieved April 15, 2020.
  26. ^ "1885 Society Distinguished Scholars Selected | UA@Work". uaatwork.arizona.edu. Archived from the original on July 21, 2021. Retrieved April 15, 2020.
  27. ^ "Comer Fellows – Comer Family Foundation". www.comerfamilyfoundation.org. Retrieved April 15, 2020.
  28. ^ "AAPG 2011–2012 AAPG Distinguished Lecture Series Abstracts, #90136 (2011)". www.searchanddiscovery.com. Retrieved April 15, 2020.
  29. ^ "Faculty Awards & Honors". The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. January 22, 2018. Retrieved April 15, 2020.
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  • IPCC, 2021: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. In Press.
  • IPCC, 2013: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, 1535 pp.
  • IPCC, 2007: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, 996 pp.
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