Partner Presentation
ETH Zurich (ETHZ) is one of the world’s leading international universities in natural sciences, engineering and architecture. It has more than 20,000 students from over 120 countries including about 4000 doctoral students. ETH Zurich is consistently ranked first among all universities in continental Europe, and among the top 10 worldwide. According to the Nature Index 2018, ETHZ is the world’s top ranked university in the field of Earth and Environmental Sciences. The participating Environmental Physics group under the leadership of Prof. Gruber is part of the Environmental System Sciences Department, which encompasses 42 professorships ranging from agriculture, ecology and evolution to atmospheric and climate sciences.
The Environmental Physics group has nearly 20 years of experience in the analysis and modeling of physical, biogeochemical, and ecological processes in the Earth System. The group has currently 15 members (1 group leader, 2 senior scientists, 1 programmer, 4 post-docs, and 6 Ph.D. students, 1 support staff). One of the group’s focus areas is the investigation of the coupling of the aforementioned processes at regional scales using observations and models. To the latter end, we employ the Regional Oceanic Modeling System (ROMS), which we configured in several systems, most importantly in the circumpolar Southern Ocean, and in three of the Eastern Boundary Upwelling Systems (California, Humboldt, and Canary). The group has also long-term experience in the analysis and synthesis of ocean observations. For example, the group recently developed a novel neural network based method to estimate the global air-sea CO2 fluxes from the pCO2 observations, including the seasonal to decadal variations in the Southern Ocean. In addition, Gruber co-led several synthetic analyses of the global carbon budget, including RECCAP.
Role in project
The contribution of the Environmental Physics group of ETHZ concentrates on WP 6, where Gruber serves also as a work package co-leader
Key Personnel
Nicolas Gruber
Professor for Environmental Physics at ETH Zurich