Tommaso Alberti
NP Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences
The 2022 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Tommaso Alberti for outstanding research in the fields of data analysis and modeling, via dynamical system approaches, to understand complexity in geoscience, space plasma, and the planetary environment.
Tommaso Alberti obtained his PhD degree at the University of Calabria with a thesis on “Effects of the solar activity on Space Weather and Earth’s climate” in June 2017. He was first a post-doc researcher at the University of Calabria, working on “Effects of the solar variability on the Earth’s environment”. From December 2017 to November 2020 he was a post-doc at the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, working on the characterization of the interplanetary and near-Earth environment as well as on turbulence in solar wind. Since December 2020 he is a fixed-term researcher at the same institute working on solar wind properties and interactions with planetary environments.
His interests cover all aspects of geosciences (magnetosphere, ionosphere, climate variability), planetary environments (coupling with solar wind, plasma physics, exosphere), space plasma (turbulence, intermittency, MHD), and recently fluid turbulence via von Karman experiments, on both theoretical and data analysis aspects.
Alberti is a very active Early Career Scientist. In the last two years he was approaching one of the most intensively studied contemporary problems in nonlinear sciences, i.e., the characterization of the multiscale nature of fluctuations from nonlinear and non-stationary time series. In his opening paper published on Chaos in 2020, he addressed this problem by combining two established concepts, the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and generalized fractal dimensions, into a unified analysis framework. He demonstrated that the intrinsic mode functions derived by EMD can be used as a source of local (in terms of scales) information about the properties of the phase-space trajectory of the system under study, allowing to derive multiscale measures when looking at the behavior of the generalized fractal dimensions at different scales. On the same line, he recently combined the multivariate empirical mode decomposition with two dynamical system metrics based on Extreme Value Theory.
He received six invited talks and made 35 oral presentations and more than 20 posters. He is the Early Career Scientist (ECS) representative of the Nonlinear Processes in Geosciences Division of the EGU. He has been convener of different sessions and short courses at EGU General Assemblies since 2018. He is Guest Associate Editor of the journal Frontiers in Physics, a member of Topics Board of the journals Entropy and Atmosphere, and Guest Editor of the Special Issue “New Achievements on Chaos, Turbulence and Complexity in Heliospheric Space Plasma Dynamics” on Entropy. He obtained in 2018 the “Vincenzo Ferraro” award for his interesting studies on the existence of a scale separation between fast and slow processes of the Earth’s magnetosphere.
He published 48 refereed publications with a H-index of 13 according to Scopus and a number of citations of 337.