Raffaele Ferrari

Research Interests

I am an oceanographer interested in the role the ocean plays in the Earth system. In my group, we focus specifically on turbulence in the ocean and atmosphere, the impact of ocean turbulence on marine biology and the carbon cycle, and the ocean-atmosphere-land interactions that shape past, present, and future climates.

Currently, I am a co-principal investigator on two ambitious projects developing new numerical models to study the Earth system:

CliMA — the Climate Modelling Alliance, co-led by Caltech Professor Tapio Schneider — is a collaboration among Caltech, JPL, and MIT creating a next-generation Earth System Model optimized for GPUs that leverages AI tools to learn from observations. 

BC3 — Bringing Computation to the Climate Challenge, co-led by MIT Professor Noelle Selin — is an MIT Climate Grand Challenge project building high-speed AI emulators of Earth System Models. 

Topics I investigate:

• Atmospheric dynamics
• Biogeochemistry
• Fluid dynamics
• Ocean dynamics
• Ocean modeling
• Paleoclimate

Biographic Sketch

Raffaele Ferrari joined the EAPS faculty in 2002. After earning a BS and MS in physics from the Università di Torino in 1994, Ferrari pursued PhD studies in fluid dynamics and oceanography at Politecnico di Torino (1999) and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (2000). Before arriving at MIT, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Ferrari served as the chair of the EAPS Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate from 2012 to 2022 and is currently co-director of the MIT Lorenz Center. This independent interdisciplinary research center promotes the study of climate science as an academic pursuit, seeking fundamental discovery outside the lens of climate forecasting.

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