Episode 10: Gabe Vecchi

Deep Convection

Gabe Vecchi’s research spans a remarkably wide range of topics: he started as an oceanographer, and studied intraseasonal variability in the Pacific, before moving to the Indian Ocean, and then, when he moved to Princeton in the 2000s, to a range of atmospheric problems, including a critically important paper on the influence of global warming on the tropical Walker circulation. And then Gabe got into hurricanes, a topic on which he’s been a key player for a decade and a half now.

He has made important contributions not just on those topics, but on a dizzying array of others that one can see on his truly remarkable publication list. Gabe’s work spans ocean and atmosphere, tropical and extratropical, weather and climate, basic and applied, and nearly every other dichotomy in this field one can think of.
In fact, Gabe says that to keep things fresh, scientists should be forced to change the topics they work on every 10 years. He himself certainly loves to seek out new problems and projects, but he somehow manages to do that without having to drop the old problems he used to work on. Hallmarks of Gabe’s work, and as you’ll hear, Gabe himself, are freshness, openness to new ideas, and openness to what the data say for that matter, and overall the lack of pretense that he brings to science, and to life.

Gabe’s story really starts in Venezuela. After being born in Boston, he spent most of his childhood there, moving back to the USA, and New Jersey in particular, when he was 16, fleeing the runaway inflation, deterioration of living standards, and other difficulties that came with the Chavez regime. You can’t hear Gabe’s Venezuelan background in his perfect American accent, which he describes learning from TV shows as a high school student. But it gives him a particular perspective on what’s happening in the US now, and at the end of the episode he and Adam get into what the US democracy’s accelerating failures do and don’t have in common with Venezuela’s.

Gabe’s scientific career led him from his undergraduate studies at Rutgers to graduate school at the University of Washington, and then from NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle to its Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton. He was a civil servant for a number of years before moving across the street a few years ago to become professor in the Geosciences department at Princeton University, where he’s also Director of The High Meadows Environmental Institute and Deputy Director of the Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System.

Apart from talking about science, Gabe and Adam also discuss the challenges of communicating their science to the media, what kinds of climate science do and don’t matter to real-world mitigation or adaptation efforts, and other issues that they’ve both struggled with. And Gabe gives advice on how to make important decisions:

“So many of the things that affect the paths that we take are so totally out of our control, even totally invisible to us, that spending too much time planning beyond making sure that you’re not making a really obviously bad decision is, I think, a waste of energy. And it keeps you from discovering things.”

He applied that decision-making philosophy for example when he had to decide where he wanted to go for graduate school:

“I had winnowed down the choice to two places. One was Washington and one was another place on the West Coast. And so, the reason I chose Washington… And this I’ll stand behind. This is the way to make decisions. I winnowed it down to two good options, and then I chose something almost arbitrary to make the distinction, and what I chose was where my dog would be happier.
[…] Moving past the decision as fast as possible and in a way that was as amusing and stress-free as possible to me was the way to do it. So, thinking about what my dog would have wanted was that.”

Besides being an amazingly productive and influential scientist whose impacts are both broad and deep, Gabe is also an open book, full of ideas, and you’ll get that clearly from this conversation.

The interview with Gabe was recorded in May 2022. Image credit: Denise Applewhite, Princeton University Office of Communications

• Gabe’s website at Princeton University