I'm interested in understanding the variability of the climate of the 20th century and to investigate its potential predictability. The focus is on interannual to decadal time scales. A particular emphasis is given to the investigation of atmospheric and oceanic teleconnection pattern and on the separation of forced and internal variability of the climate system. The research on climate variability includes phenomena such as:

* Analysis of observed trends in tropical and extratropical key climate variables in the 2nd half of the 20th century.

* Regime behavior of the extratropical flow.

* The North Atlantic Oscillation and its relation to tropical and extratropical sea surface temperatures.

* The Cold Ocean Warm Land pattern and Pacific Decadal Oscillation pattern and their relation.

* The El Nino Southern Oscillation teleconnections with monsoons and their changes on decadal time scale.

* Sahel rainfall variability and its relation to sea surface temperatures.

* Influence of the mean state on El Nino Southern Oscillation variability.

The research tool is mainly the ICTP Atmospherical General Circulation Model ICTP AGCM that is used by a wide international network of scientists and institutions and a coupled Ocean Atmosphere version, where the AGCM is coupled to the MICOM isopycnical Ocean model in several regional configurations. Furthermore, observations and model output are analyzed using statistical tools.

Curriculum Vitae and Publication List