Masahiro WATANABE

Professor Masahiro (Masa) Watanabe was appointed as a member of the WCRP Joint Scientific Committee (JSC) starting 1 January 2025.

Masa has previously been extensively involved in WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling (WGCM) as a Japanese modeling representative since 2018. He also served as co-chair of the Cloud Feedback Model Intercomparison Project (CFMIP) for 2017-2022. As an expert in climate modeling and large-scale climate dynamics, he served as a Lead Author of the IPCC 6^th Assessment Report.

Masa’s expertise includes climate dynamics, mechanisms of climate change and variability, large-scale atmospheric circulation, and weather extremes mainly using a numerical approach based on global climate modeling. He has been a lead coordinator of the Japanese community climate model MIROC for more than two decades and fostered young climate scientists throughout his career. He obtained his PhD at the University of Tokyo in 2000, and after a post-doc period at the University of Hawaii, he became an associate professor at Hokkaido University in 2002. He moved to the University of Tokyo in 2007 and has been a professor in the Division of Climate System Research, Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute (AORI), since 2016. He has also been a Deputy Director of the UTokyo Center for Climate Solutions, launched in 2022 for interdisciplinary research and education at the University of Tokyo. He has over 190 publications, including co-authored papers, on various topics such as climate change attribution, climate feedback and sensitivity, natural climate variability, and extreme weather events.

For more information and contact details see Masa Watanabe’s web page.