Leila Carvalho

Assistant Professor

Contacts

Ellison Hall 6813
UC Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4060

tel: (805) 893 6986
fax: (805)893-2578
leila@icess.ucsb.edu

Personal web site

Biography

Dr. Carvalho academic education includes B.S., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Atmospheric Sciences. She started her academic career in 1988 hired as a tenure track lecturer and researcher in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, two years after finishing her Bachelor of Sciences degree. As part of a young and enthusiastic faculty, she had the privilege and challenge to build what today is considered the best Program in Atmospheric Sciences in Latin-America. She finished her Ph.D. in 1998, when she became Assistant Professor in the same department. She spent two years as a visiting researcher in ICESS, UCSB, (2000-2002), and since then she has been collaborating as a Co-PI in several research projects related to Climate Dynamics. Her current teaching, advising and research interests can be broadly classified into regional and large-scale climate variability and modeling, global climate change and scaling processes in geophysics. As a participating scientist in the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in the Amazon (LBA), she is involved in interdisciplinary projects in the Amazon and Brazilian Savanna. On large and regional scales, she and her students have been interested in climate variability and modeling of the monsoon system in South America, atmospheric variations on intraseasonal to interannual time-scales and occurrences of extreme precipitation and temperature. In the context of global climate change, they have analyzed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Coupled Global Climate Models simulations to investigate impacts of global warming in the characteristics of the monsoons. Recently, she has investigated decadal variations in temperature anomalies in the present climate and from reconstructed paleoclimatic temperature records. Also, she has investigated dynamical forcings of extreme intraseasonal anomalies in temperature and sea-ice area in the Antarctica Peninsula, impacts of tropical-extratropical teleconnections on the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode, storm tracks in the subtropics of South America and the Antarctic Ozone. A new focus of Dr. Carvalho’s research group is on the investigation of regional processes in the Antarctica Peninsula in response to atmospheric forcings on intraseasonal time-scales using the Brazilian version of the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (BRAMS).

Selected Publications