Rahul Pai
Postdoctoral Associate
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: PhD Savitribhai Phule Pune University
Research Websites: Mubadala Arabian Center for Climate and Environmental ScienceS (ACCESS)
Research Areas: Ocean modelling; Climate variability; Ocean circulation
Rahul Pai is a researcher specializing in areas such as climate variability, ocean modeling, and the decadal climate predictability. Currently, he is a Postdoctoral Associate at Mubadala Arabian Center for Climate and Environmental ScienceS (ACCESS), New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). Before joining NYUAD, Pai worked as a Project Scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) from January 2023 to December 2025. During this period, he contributed to the development of the ocean component for the IITM-Decadal Climate Prediction System (IITM-DCPS), a prestigious national project that contributes annual to decadal hindcasts to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). His work involved optimizing the Modular Ocean Model (MOM) within high-performance computing (HPC) environments, to generate the ocean initial conditions and improve the accuracy of climate predictions.
Pai obtained his PhD in Atmospheric and Space Sciences from Savitribhai Phule Pune University , India in 2025. The research focused on the mechanisms of ocean circulation variability, with a particular emphasis on the Shallow Meridional Overturning Circulation (SMOC) and its association on global climate teleconnections. The work provided groundbreaking insights into the intra-decadal variability of the Indian Ocean and its association with Southern Ocean teleconnections. Another significant milestone was establishing the linkage between the meridional heat transport in the Indian Ocean and Southern African rainfall at intra-decadal timescales. The study was the first to report that intra-decadal variations in heat transport associated with the SMOC significantly influence rainfall over Southern Africa during the austral summer. This discovery was vital as it may pave the way for improved predictability of rainfall patterns in the region. Prior to the doctorate, Pai earned an MTech in Atmospheric Sciences from Cochin University of Science and Technology (2018).