Xavier Levine

Xavier Levine is a climate dynamicist whose research interests primarily lie in the dynamics of tropical circulations and their response to climate changes. His doctoral research has advanced our understanding of the mechanisms controlling the Hadley circulation, an overturning circulation that dominates the climate on Earth in the tropics. Predicting how this circulation may respond to an increase in greenhouse gas concentrations is required for assessing the impact of global warming on human societies and ecosystems in the low latitudes. In his thesis work, Xavier has used a hierarchy of numerical models to demonstrate quantitatively that the storminess in the mid-latitude regions affect strongly the Hadley circulation, even in regions quite far from the center of these storms such as in the equatorial regions.

As a postdoctoral associate, Xavier investigates how monsoonal features can remotely affect aridity over deserts in the subtropical regions, and how this may change with global climate changes. Xavier graduated in 2006 from the University of Chicago, with a B.A. in Physics, and received in 2012 a PhD in Environmental Science and Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, supervised by Prof. Tapio Schneider. Xavier started in January 2013 at the Yale Climate & Energy Institute, working in collaboration with Prof. William R. Boos.