Speaker: Dr. Alessandra Giannini, NYU
Title: "Connecting natural variability and anthropogenic change in the climate of the Sahel"
Abstract:
Understanding of the processes of oceanic influence that shape the climate of the African Sahel has advanced significantly in the last 20 years. A single, simple argument, independent of time scale, explains the past multi-decadal change that manifested in the recurrence of drought in the 1970s and 1980s, and accounts for the year-to-year predictability that is realized in seasonal-to-interannual climate prediction. Projection of the influence of anthropogenic emissions onto the same simple argument provides an argument for attribution -- of Sahel drought to external forcing. I will present the argument, and discuss its application to understanding the past, and limitations with respect to projections of future change.
Bio:
Alessandra Giannini first moved to New York in 1995, to pursue studies in tropical climate dynamics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. She returned in 2003, after a postdoc at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, to join the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, a unit of the Earth Institute at Columbia. In 2017, Giannini was among the first batch of Make Our Planet Great Again laureates, and moved to the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at l'Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, where she subsequently became full professor in the Geosciences department, and director of the Center for Education and Research on the Environment and Society. She is now back in New York for a third time, having joined the Environmental Studies department at NYU in January 2026. A physical climate scientist by training, her research interests include the dynamics of tropical climate (monsoons and climate change; predictability, predictions and projections at time scales from interannual to multi-decadal), and impacts, vulnerability and adaptation to climate (desertification and re-greening in the Sahel; climate sensitivity of food security and livelihoods).
In person attendance at this seminar is only open to Columbia University affiliates.
