Faculty Spotlights

Christiane Jablonowski

Faculty

Originally hailing from Germany, Professor Christiane Jablonowski​ first came to the Climate & Space (then called AOSS) back in 1998 to pursue a Ph.D, and ended up staying.

She initially worked with (CLaSP Professor) Joyce Penner in atmospheric sciences for five years, but ultimately decided to shift gears. “I wanted to get back numerical modeling,” says Christiane. “So I found a source of funding and I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Christiane’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining her interests in atmospheric science, mathematics, and computational science. On a broad level, her research is used to develop and implement large-scale climate models. “We use complex partial differential equations in our modeling, but they must be adapted to work within our framework. My work happens where mathematics meets physics.”

Important byproducts of her work are the Idealized Test Cases used by atmospheric and climate study centers worldwide to potentially help debug new climate models. The rigorous ITCs can assist researchers in quickly finding and correcting errors in their models. She is affiliated with the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery & Engineering, where many of the larger scale climate models are run.

Christiane is also a key organizer of the bi-annual summertime Dynamical Core Model Intercomparison Project (DCMIP) that takes place at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. The DCMIP provides students with the opportunity to work with leading climate researchers, and employ field research standards (such as Idealized Test Cases) in working with real-world data.

When she isn’t developing new approaches to modeling our enormous and complex climate systems, Christiane and her husband enjoying outdoors activities like waterskiing, hiking and camping (“we love the national parks, particularly the Rockies”).  About six years ago, she got into baking homemade bread, specializing in a nice sourdough rye.  She also has a very large fruit garden with a variety of trees and berry bushes. “We like to make homemade jam. It goes well with the bread.”