(1946- ) Italian Oceanographer
The circulation of the water in an ocean basin is highly complex. It depends upon the shape of the basin, temperatures of the air and the water, prevailing winds and storms, in addition to the rotation of the Earth. These processes and interactions of ocean and atmosphere lead to large-scale phenomena like El Nino and North Atlantic oscillations, which in turn can have major effects on our climate. Paola Rizzoli is one of the premier scientists to model such circulation. She applies a strong physics and math background to understand and ultimately to predict these catastrophic changes in ocean circulation. Her first interest was to model the regular and dangerous flooding under varying meteorological conditions in Venice in her native Italy. She expanded these studies to investigate the dynamics of strong oceanographic and meteorological flow structures with long lives, like hurricanes, and their effects on general ocean circulation. These features violate the principles of chaos, the intrinsic unpredictability of ocean and meteorological flow structures. This research was motivated by the work of Edward Lorenz, the developer of chaos theory who helped bring Riz-zoli to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981.
Paola Rizzoli’s research then expanded to model general ocean circulation from the global scale to the ocean basin scale. For example, she has been modeling circulation in the Atlantic Ocean, which is a crucial component for modeling the climate system of the Earth. Her research first focused on the Gulf Stream, but more recently it has concentrated on the tropical-subtropical interactions affecting the equatorial Atlantic. She also models marginal seas like the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea as a subcomponent of these general circulation models. These local circulation models have major implications for the development of local ecosystems and the flora and fauna that inhabit them. To collect these data, Rizzoli served as chief scientist during oceano-graphic campaigns in the Adriatic Sea on the research vessels Adriatic I, II, and III of the Italian National Research Council. Finally, she does research in data collection and assimilation of all available observations for “model data synthesis” for numerical circulation models.
Paola Rizzoli was born on April 18, 1946, in Lonigo, Italy. She attended Lyceum Benedetti in Venice, Italy, where she earned a bachelor of science degree in physics and mathematics with highest honors in 1963. She attended graduate school at the University of Padua, Italy, where she earned a Ph.D. in physics, summa cum laude, in 1968. She completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Padua in 1969 before joining the Istituto Dinamica Grandi Masse, which was created by the Italian National Research Council the next year. She achieved the rank of senior scientist by 1976. In 1971, she became a regular commuter to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego.
She was a visiting scientist in 1971-1974 before entering the Ph.D. program. Rizzoli earned a second Ph.D. in oceanography in 1978 and accepted the position of Cecil and Ida Green Scholar at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California at San Diego while on leave from the Istituto Dinamica Grandi Masse. In 1981, she joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where she remains today. Since 1997, Rizzoli has served as director of the Joint Program in Oceanography and Ocean Engineering between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Paola Rizzoli married Peter Stone in 1987.
Paola Rizzoli is an author of 97 articles in international journals, professional volumes, and governmental reports. She is also an editor of nine professional volumes. Many of these papers are seminal works on the modeling of ocean circulation. She received nine honors and fellowships, including the 1998 Masi Prize from the Italian Ministry of Culture and Education.
Rizzoli has performed significant service to the profession. She served as president (19992003) and deputy secretary (1995-1999) for the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Ocean (IAPSO), in addition to many other committees and panels. She was also president of the Committee on Physical Oceanography of the CIESM (International Exploration of the Mediterranean Sea) 1984-1988) and president of the Italian Commission to Assign University Chairs in the Physics of the Earth (1991-1992). She also served on numerous committees and panels for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the American Meteorological Society, Institute of Naval Oceanography, National Centers for Environmental Prediction, Goddard Space Flight Center, UNESCO, and the National Science Foundation. She also served as an editor for the Journal of Geophysical Research, among other editorial positions.
