Professor Dr Thomas F. Stocker

Research Priorities: Climate dynamics, palaeoclimate, climate modelling, ice core research, climate projection
Thomas Stocker is a Swiss geoscientist and climate physicist. He develops climate models to simulate the climatic changes of the last two million years as well as to project future changes in climate. He uses the analysis of ice cores, in particular greenhouse gas concentrations, and the dynamics of the earth system for the reconstruction of past climate chances.
The development of simplified coupled climate models allows simulations of climatic changes over many ice age cycles. These models are used to understand the dynamics recorded in paleoclimate archives, in particular records of greenhouse gases in polar ice cores and tracers measured in marine sediments. With that, Thomas Stocker opened new perspectives on both the role of palaeoceanographic trace substances in climate reconstructions as well as on calculation of future changes to the climate.
The coupling of the two hemispheres is primarily a function of the deep oceanic circulations, wherein a kind of interhemispheric seesaw shaped the climatic behaviour of the last ice age. Thomas Stocker investigates the function of this climatic seesaw and its influence on the global carbon cycle. The focus is on the transition period from about a million years ago where 40.000 year-long cycles gave way to those of the ice ages that lasted 100.000 years.
Current works are concerned with the tipping points in the coupled climatic system and how reaching them could be avoided. In ice core research the focus is on the determination of the concentration of green house gases (CO2, CH4), especially on the high-resolution reconstruction of fluctuations in the CO2-Concentration during the last 800.000 years. Such measurements of ice core samples from Antarctica provide important information about the factors that propel and amplify changes in climate.
From 2008 to 2015, Thomas Stocker co-chaired “Working Group 1” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report was adopted in September of 2013 and formed the scientific basis of the Paris-Accord of 2015.