Richard Lindzen - Career

Career

Lindzen has published papers on Hadley circulation, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, hydrodynamic instability, mid-latitude weather, global heat transport, the water cycle, ice ages, seasonal atmospheric effects. His main contribution to the academic literature on anthropogenic climate change is his proposal of the iris hypothesis in 2001, with co-authors Ming-Dah Chou and Arthur Y. Hou. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Science, Health, and Economic Advisory Council at the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy. Educated at Harvard University (Ph.D., '64, S.M., '61, A.B., '60), he moved to MIT in 1983, prior to which he held positions at the University of Washington (1964–1965), Institute for Theoretical Meteorology, University of Oslo (1965–1966), National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) (1966–1967), University of Chicago (1968–1972) and Harvard University (1972–1983). He also briefly held a position of Visiting Lecturer at UCLA in 1967. As of January 2010, his publications list included 230 papers and articles published between 1965 and 2008, with five in process for 2009. He is the author of a standard textbook on atmospheric dynamics, and co-authored the monograph Atmospheric Tides with Sydney Chapman.