Paul J Goodman

Interests

Teaching

Our planet is vast, complicated and dynamic, and we live in a time of great change. As an undergraduate, I benefited from professors who lived William Butler Yeats’ attitude about teaching, “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” I now strive to emulate my mentors in my own teaching. Sharing the passion and drive for understanding of both the known and unknown with my students is one of the great joys of working here at the University of Arizona. The terrific advantage of teaching and learning at a major research university is the opportunity to use the very latest tools to help our students make their own discoveries about their planet. Over the past 10 years, I have taught or co-taught close to 20,000 students and they are amazing! My research benefits daily from the energy and enthusiasm our students bring to their work.I find that I am consistently amazed by my students’ performance when I expect excellence and give them the hands-on experience to achieve it. I inspire my students to do their best work by asking them to do research for homework, like finding the latest satellite data on the winds, the currents and the ocean temperatures in order to find the best spot for surfing that day. I work to develop the classes I teach to bring earth system science directly into the classroom to captivate students and ultimately draw them into our shared adventure of discovering our planet Earth.I love teaching large classes – the bigger, the better. I want to teach anyone who wants to learn about our Earth, and large classes are the practical way to accomplish this. I strive to create an individualized learning environment with each and every student by offering opportunities to interact with members of our teaching team like honors preceptors and graduate teaching assistants through our study groups, as well as my own office hours. The biggest challenge of large classes is maintaining a dynamic and constructive learning environment, but this is made easier by having access to UA’s best classroom - ENR2-N120. We want our students’ energy and enthusiasm, but have to insist that they take responsibility for providing a constructive learning environment for their friends and neighbors in the lectures. We helped our students to stay engaged and to keep on top of their progress by using response devices (clickers) that allow them to register their opinion and assess their understanding. My students don’t come into class as clean slates – they have their own interests, experiences and perspectives. I want to learn what they know and think, and for them to take what I have to offer and integrate it into their own lives. I learn from my students, because I know that I have glimpsed only a tiny slice of life and that I am bound by the limits of my own time and experience. The future belongs to these bright, motivated individuals and it is my privilege to help them prepare for it.

Research

When asked about my research two quotes always come to mind. The first is from my graduate advisor, Ed Sarachik, who used to say, “When it comes to climate, the ocean is part of the atmosphere.” The second is from the author Robert Heinlein, “Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.” My research is primarily focused on the role of the ocean in climate: across all spatial scales, from the large-scale wind-driven circulation to small-scale coastal phenomena, and temporal scales, past, present and future. During my graduate work, I met my close collaborator, Joellen Russell (Distinguished Professor of Geosciences, University of Arizona, and my spouse), and we have been exploring the effects of the changing wind patterns on the ocean’s storage of heat and carbon. Now that it is clear that “climate” itself is evolving due to our anthropogenic “experiment”, understanding (i.e. modeling) the interactions between atmosphere and ocean is even more critical.I use numerical models and data analysis to assess the climate. Both models and data have their imperfections (measurement uncertainty, sub-grid scale approximations, etc.) so the intercomparison of models with each other and with the data is essential. Different experiments within the same model reveal the workings of that model and, hopefully, the underlying physics. Comparing models with different formulations as well as on different scales (e.g. global vs regional) allows us to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the models and our assumptions. Reproducing the observed mean and variability (e.g. seasonal, inter-annual, or glacial-interglacial) of climate will require a broad understanding of the main forcings across all spatial and temporal scales. Tracers, both real (e.g radiocarbon, chlorofluorocarbons, nutrients, etc.) and idealized (e.g. age tracers, dyes, lagrangian floats, etc.), are an integral part of our analysis techniques; they reveal patterns in the physical circulation that are essential to solving the vastly underdetermined (unmeasured!) systems we study, especially when trying to project future changes to the system. What determines the global climate has become the most important scientific question of our age, and I am delighted to “live in interesting times” and to be able to study it.

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

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