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Joellen Russell

Joellen Russell

University Distinguished Professor, Biogeochemical Dynamics
Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair of Integrative Science

Office: Gould-Simpson Bldg. 208
 

(520) 626-2194
jrussell@arizona.edu
ORCID #0000-0001-9937-6056SCOPUS #7404210007Google Scholar

Prof. Joellen L. Russell is an oceanographer, climate scientist and University Distinguished Professor at the University of Arizona. Her research explores the role of the ocean in the global climate, focusing on the Southern Ocean and the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds. She uses robot floats, supercomputers and satellites to study the Southern Ocean and the ocean’s role in the transient global climate. Russell uses earth system models to simulate the climate and carbon cycle of the past, the present and the future, and develops observationally-based metrics to evaluate these simulations. 

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. 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. 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 the "big, fast, and global" transition and explains 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.

Prof. Russell is the lead for the modeling theme of the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling project (SOCCOM) including its Southern Ocean Model Intercomparison Project (SOMIP), in active collaboration with colleagues at the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (NOAA/GFDL). She is the current US Executive Committee member of the International Association of the Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO). She received her A.B. in Environmental Geoscience from Harvard and her PhD in Oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.

Dr. Russell is one of the authors of the climate scientists’ amicus brief cited in the landmark 2007 Massachusetts vs the EPA Supreme Court decision that ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant covered under the Clean Air Act and must be regulated by the EPA. In 2020, she and Dr. Katherine Hayhoe cofounded Science Moms, a nonpartisan group of climate scientists, who are also mothers, working to demystify climate change.

Joellen grew up north of the Arctic Circle in a fishing village and began working toward her current position at the age of 12 – she can’t believe she gets paid to work on the biggest challenge of our time, climate change. 

Prof. Russell has joint appointments in Departments of Lunar and Planetary Sciences, Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences, and Mathematics/Program in Applied Mathematics. She has been an elected, at-large member of the UA Faculty Senate since 2015. Prof. Russell is also an executive committee member of the University of Arizona Space Institute, an executive committee member of the Applied Math Graduate Interdisciplinary Program, and a faculty member of the Global Change Graduate Interdisciplinary Program. She is also the founder and former Chair of the UA Research Computing Governance Committee (RCGC)

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