Research Interests

I am a physical oceanographer and climate scientist researching climate variability and change. I have a particular interest in how climate change impacts Earth’s energy and water cycles, and the role that greenhouse gas emissions and other climate forcing agents have in driving change. The role of the global ocean in climate is my primary focus, with the coupling across ocean, atmosphere, cryosphere and land a key interest and requirement to better understanding climate variability and change. I have extensive experience with a vast array of observational data and platforms, along with models and model data which underpin my research.

Service and leadership Roles and other professional activity:

• IPCC authorship: Lead Author IPCC Sixth Assessment Report “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis” (2018-2023); Contributing Author IPCC Fifth Assessment Report “Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis” (2011-2014)
• Co-Chair, World Climate Research Program (WCRP), Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) Infrastructure Panel 2017-; WGCM Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) Panel 2020-;
• Co-lead, CMIP Forcings Task Team (2022-)
• Member Steering Group, obs4MIPs (2015-)
• External Peer Reviewer: U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Geosciences Directorate (2012-), U.S. Department of Energy, Biological and Environmental Research (2018-), and NASA Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science (ROSES; 2020-)
• Associate Editor: Frontiers in Climate, Predictions and Projections (2020-)
• Guest Editor: Oceanography, Special Issue on Ocean Warming (2018)
• Convener: American Geophysical Union (AGU) Global and Environmental Change Section, Fall Meeting “Ocean salinity and the global water cycle” (2014-); “Climate forcings” (2023-)
• Reviewer for various international peer-reviewed journals across the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific, including Nature and Science

Ph.D., Physical Oceanography, University of Tasmania, Tasmania, Australia, 2010

B.S. (Hons 1A), Marine Science, Murdoch University, Western Australia, Australia 2003

B.S., Marine and Environmental Science, Murdoch University, Western Australia, Australia 2001

Selected Publications

Durack, Paul J., Susan E. Wijffels and Richard J. Matear (2012) Ocean Salinities Reveal Strong Global Water Cycle Intensification During 1950-2000. Science, 458 (6080), pp 455-458. DOI: 10.1126/science.1212222

Durack, Paul J., and Susan E. Wijffels (2010) Fifty-Year Trends in Global Ocean Salinities and Their Relationship to Broadscale Warming. Journal of Climate, 23 (16), pp 4342-4362 DOI: 10.1175/2010JCLI3377.1

Durack, Paul J. (2015) Ocean salinity and the global water cycle. Oceanography (Salinity Processes in the Upper-Ocean Regional Studies [SPURS] Special Issue), 28 (1), pp 20-31. DOI: 10.5670/oceanog.2015.03

Durack, Paul J., Peter J. Gleckler, Felix W. Landerer and Karl E. Taylor (2014) Quantifying Underestimates of Long-term Upper-Ocean Warming. Nature Climate Change, 4 (11), pp 999-1005. DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2389

Durack, Paul J., Susan E. Wijffels and Peter J. Gleckler (2014) Long-term Sea-level Change Revisited: The Role of Salinity. Environmental Research Letters, 9 (11), 114017. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/9/11/114017

Durack, Paul J., Peter J. Gleckler, Sarah G. Purkey, Gregory C. Johnson, John M. Lyman, and Tim P. Boyer (2018) Ocean Warming: From the Surface to the Deep in Observations and Models. Oceanography, 32 (2), pp 41-51. DOI: 10.5670/oceanog.2018.227

Durack, Paul J., K. E. Taylor, V. Eyring, S. K. Ames, T. Hoang, D. Nadeau, C. Doutriaux, M. Stockhause, and P. J. Gleckler (2018) input4MIPs: Making CMIP Model Forcing More Transparent. EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, 99. DOI: 10.1029/2018EO101751

Durack, Paul J., Susan E. Wijffels and Nathaniel L. Bindoff (2011) [Global Oceans] Ocean Salinity: A Water Cycle Diagnostic? [In “State of the Climate 2010”] Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 92 (6), pp S91-S93. DOI: 10.1175/1520-0477-92.6.S1

 

Arcodia, Marybeth C., Elizabeth A. Barnes, Paul J. Durack, Patrick W. Keys and Juliette Rocha (2024) Sea Surface Salinity Provides Subseasonal Predictability for Forecasts of Opportunity of U.S. Summertime Precipitation. Geophysical Research Letters, in review, 18 pp. DOI: 10.22541/au.170602087.73596352/v1

Lee, Jiwoo, Peter J. Gleckler, Min-Seop Ahn, Ana Ordonez, Paul A. Ullrich, Kenneth R. Sperber, Karl E. Taylor, Yann Y. Planton, Eric Guilyardi, Paul J. Durack, Celine Bonfils, Mark D. Zelinka, Li-Wei Chao, Bo Dong, Charles Doutriaux, Chengzhu Zhang, Tom Vo, Jason Boutte, Michael F. Wehner, Angeline G. Pendergrass, Daehyun Kim, Zeyu Xue, Andrew T. Wittenberg, and John Krasting (2024) Objective Evaluation of Earth System Models: PCMDI Metrics Package (PMP) version 3, Geoscientific Model Development, in review, 48 pp. DOI: 10.5194/egusphere-2023-2720

Röthig, Till, Stacey M. Trevathan-Tackett, Christian R. Voolstra, Cliff Ross, Samuel Chaffron, Paul J. Durack, Laura M. Warmuth, and Michael Sweet (2023) Human-induced salinity changes impact marine organisms and ecosystems. Global Change Biology, 29 (17), pp 4731-4749. DOI: 10.1111/gcb.16859

Schmidt, Gavin A., Timothy Andrews, Susanne E. Bauer, Paul J. Durack, Norman G. Loeb, V. Ramaswamy, Nathan P. Arnold, Michael G. Bosilovich, Jason Cole, Larry W. Horowitz, Gregory C. Johnson, John M. Lyman, Brian Medeiros, Takuro Michibata, Dirk Olonscheck, David Paynter, Shiv Priyam Raghuraman, Michael Schulz, Daisuke Takasuka, Vijay Tallapragada, Patrick C. Taylor, and Tilo Ziehn (2023) CERESMIP: a climate modeling protocol to investigate trends in Earth's Energy Imbalance. Frontiers in Climate: Predictions and Projections, 5, 10 pp. DOI: 10.3389/fclim.2023.1202161

Tesdal, Jan-Erik, Graeme A. MacGilchrist, Rebecca L. Beadling, Stephen M. Griffies, John P. Krasting and Paul J. Durack (2023) Revisiting Interior Water Mass Responses to Surface Forcing Changes and the Subsequent Effects on Overturning in the Southern Ocean. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 128 (3), e2022JC019105, 36 pp. DOI: 10.1029/2022JC019105

Eyring, V., N. P. Gillett, K. M. AchutaRao, R. Barimalala, M. Barreiro Parillo, N. Bellouin, C. Cassou, P. J. Durack, Y. Kosaka, S. McGregor, S.-K. Min, O. Morgenstern, Y. Sun and contributing authors (2021): Human influence on the climate system (Chapter 3). In Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Pean, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M. I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J. B. R. Matthews, T. K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. pp 423-551. DOI: 10.1017/9781009157896.005. Accessible online

IPCC AR6: Ch2 (Gulev et al., 2021), Ch8 (Douville et al., 2021), and Ch9 (Fox-Kemper et al., 2021)

Silvy, Yona, Eric Guilyardi, Jean-Baptiste Sallee and Paul J. Durack (2020) Human-induced changes to the global ocean water masses and their time of emergence. Nature Climate Change, 10 (11), pp 1030-1036. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-020-0878-x

Marvel, Kate, Benjamin I. Cook, Celine J. W. Bonfils, Paul J. Durack, Jason E. Smerdon and A. Park Williams (2019) Twentieth-century hydroclimate changes consistent with human influence. Nature, 569 (7754), pp 59-65. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1149-8

Tsujino, Hiroyuki, Shogo Urakawa, Hideyuki Nakano, R. Justin Small, Who M. Kim, Stephen G. Yeager, Gokhan Danabasoglu, Tatsuo Suzuki, Jonathan L. Bamber, Mats Bentsen, Claus W. Boning, Alexandra Bozec, Eric P. Chassignet, Enrique Churchitser, Fabio Boeira Dias, Paul J. Durack, Stephen M. Griffies, Yayoi Harada, Mehmet Ilicak, Simon A. Josey, Chiaki Kobayashi, Shinya Kobayashi, Yoshiki Komuro, William G. Large, Julien Le Sommer, Simon J. Marsland, Simona Masina, Markus Scheinert, Hiroyuki Tomita, Maria Valdivieso and Dai Yamazaki (2018) JRA-55 based surface dataset for driving ocean-sea-ice models (JRA55-do). Ocean Modelling, 130, pp 79-139. DOI: 10.1016/j.ocemod.2018.07.002

Ivanova, Detelina, Peter J. Gleckler, Karl E. Taylor, Paul J. Durack, and Kate Marvel (2016) A Holistic Approach for Gauging Model Biases in Sea Ice Distribution: Moving beyond the Total Sea Ice Extent to Rectify Compensating Errors. Journal of Climate, 29 (24), pp 8965-8987. DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-16-0026.1

Gleckler, Peter J., Paul J. Durack, Ronald J. Stouffer, Gregory C. Johnson, and Chris E. Forest (2016) Industrial-era global ocean heat uptake doubles in recent decades. Nature Climate Change, 6 (4), pp 394-398. DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2915

Gleckler, Peter J., Charles Doutriaux, Paul J. Durack, Karl E. Taylor, Yuying Zhang, Dean Williams, Erik Mason, and Jerome Servonnat (2016) A more powerful reality test for climate models. EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, 97 (12). DOI: 10.1029/2016EO051663

Griffies, Stephen M., Gokhan Danabasoglu, Alistair J. Adcroft, V. Balaji, Claus Böning, Enrique Curchitser, Helge Drange, Paul J. Durack, Peter J. Gleckler, Jonathan M. Gregory, David Holland, Yoshiki Komuro, John P. Krasting, William Large, Simon J. Marsland, Simona Masina, Trevor J. McDougall, James C. Orr, Anna Pirani, Ronald J. Stouffer, Karl E. Taylor, Michael Winton, Stephen Yeager and co-authors (2016) Experimental and diagnostic protocol for the physical component of the CMIP6 Ocean Model Intercomparison Project (OMIP). Geoscientific Model Development, 9 (9), pp 3231-3296. DOI: 10.5194/gmd-9-3231-2016

Griffies, Stephen M., Jianjun Yin, Paul J. Durack, Paul Goddard, Susan C. Bates, Erik Behrens, Mats Bentsen, Daohua Bi, Arne Biastoch, Claus W. Böning, Alexandra Bozec, Eric Chassignet, Gokhan Danabasoglu, Sergey Danilov, Catia M. Domingues, Helge Drange, Riccardo Farneti, Elodie Fernandez, Richard J. Greatbatch, David M. Holland, Mehmet Ilicak, William G. Large, Katja Lorbacher, Jianhua Lu, Simon J. Marsland, Akhilesh Mishra, A.J. George Nurser, David Salas y Mélia, Jaime B. Palter, Bonita L. Samuels, Jens Schroeter, Franziska U. Schwarzkopf, Dmitry Sidorenko, Anne Marie Treguier, Yu-heng Tseng, Hiroyuki Tsujino, Petteri Uotila, Sophie Valcke, Aurore Voldoire, Qiang Wang, Michael Winton, and Xuebin Zhang (2014) An Assessment of global and regional sea level for years 1993-2007 in a suite of interannual CORE-II simulations. Ocean Modelling, 78, pp 35-89. DOI: 10.1016/j.ocemod.2014.03.004

IPCC AR5: Ch3 (Rhein et al., 2013), Ch9 (Flato et al., 2013), Ch10 (Bindoff et al., 2013), and Ch11 (Kirtman et al., 2013)

Pierce, David W., Peter J. Gleckler, Tim P. Barnett, Benjamin D. Santer, and Paul J. Durack (2012) The fingerprint of human-induced changes in the ocean's salinity and temperature fields. Geophysical Research Letters, 39 (21), GL053389. DOI: 10.1029/2012GL053389

Google Scholar Profile

 

Honors and Awards

LLNL PLS Directorate Award for leadership in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (April 2022)

LLNL Early and Mid-Career Recognition Award (September 2021)

WCRP/GCOS International Data Prize (December 2018)

LLNL PLS Directorate Award for leadership in the international Input Datasets for Model Intercomparison Project (August 2018)

LLNL AEED Spot Award Recognition of thoughtful and positive responses to Newsline discussions (August 2018)

LLNL Deputy Director Science & Technology Excellence in Publication (August 2017)

LLNL PLS Directorate Award for numerous publications in Nature Climate Change 2014-2016 (August 2016)

LLNL Deputy Director Science & Technology Excellence in Publication (September 2015)

Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Uwe Radok Award (Best Ph.D. Thesis 2010/11; March 2014)

LLNL PLS Spot Award Recognition of Publication in the Report to Science (May 2012)