Research Associate Biogeochemist

Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences
Princeton University
300 Forrestal Road
311 Sayre Hall
Princeton, NJ 08540

tel: 609-258-8340
mikaloff(at)princeton.edu

Research Interests

My research focuses on understanding the global biogeochemical cycles of carbon dioxide, methane, oxygen, and other tracers associated with climate change using observations and models. Specifically, I am interested in improving estimates of the oceanic and terrestrial fluxes of these trace gases to the atmosphere on regional to global scales, elucidating the physical parameters that are most important to their natural flux processes, and exploring the physical causes of their spatial and temporal variability.

I employ inverse methods to estimate air-sea fluxes of anthropogenic carbon, pre-industrial carbon, and oxygen separately based on ocean interior observations and Ocean General Circulation Models (OGCMs). In this approach, the ocean surface is divided into discrete regions and an OGCM is used to generate basis functions that describe how an arbitrary unit flux at the surface influences observations in the interior ocean. A minimization technique is then employed to find the combination of surface fluxes that are in optimal agreement with the observations.

Additional Information