Guilherme Luiz Torres Mendonça

Science has come to a point where we think we understand many of the most basic rules underlying our universe, from the scales of atoms and subatomic particles to those of planets, galaxies, and beyond. Yet, looking around it is easy to find a multitude of things we do not have a clear idea how they work: from trees and ecosystems to the human brain, societies, our economy, the Earth and its changing climate. This is because those systems are complex. They may be made up by such a large number of diversely interacting components that even if we knew exactly what each component is doing it would still be unclear what the whole does. I am interested in the dynamics of such systems, with focus on the Earth. My research revolves around topics relevant for the problem of climate change. In my work I have been developing and employing approaches using ideas from areas such as dynamical systems theory, inverse problems, and statistical physics. I received my PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and University of Hamburg for developing a numerical method to identify linear response functions from data and applying it to study the largely ignored timescale-dependent dynamics of the fraction of emitted CO2 that stays in the atmosphere -- and thus causes climate change -- and its connection to feedbacks between climate and the carbon cycle. Currently I hold a position as postdoctoral scientist at the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of São Paulo.Topics I am presently interested in: large-scale dynamics of the coupled climate-carbon cycle system; data assimilation methods in simple and state-of-the-art geophysical fluid models; numerical analysis of systems with applications in renewable energy harvesting. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)