International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, IEAS

Academician

Igor Esau

Profile:

Elected Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences on 25 June 2012, Professor Igor N. Esau is a distinguished Russian-born Norwegian atmospheric physicist whose research has advanced understanding of planetary boundary layers, Arctic climate dynamics, and urban atmospheric processes. He received his Ph.D. in 2003 from the Department of Earth Sciences at Uppsala University, where his dissertation on large-eddy simulation of non-local turbulence in atmospheric boundary layers was supervised by Professor Sergej Zilitinkevich, establishing a long-standing scientific collaboration that has contributed significantly to the development of stable boundary-layer theory. He currently holds a Professorship in the Department of Physics and Technology at the University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway (UiT), alongside his roles as Senior Researcher and Research Director at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center (NERSC) in Bergen, affiliated with the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research. His career, spanning Sweden and Norway, reflects a sustained effort to connect fundamental turbulence physics with high-resolution environmental prediction in the Arctic and across the Eurasian region.

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His research integrates large-eddy simulation, satellite remote sensing, and high-resolution numerical modelling to investigate interactions among the atmosphere, climate, and human settlements. In collaboration with Richard Davy, he demonstrated that changes in atmospheric boundary-layer depth can substantially influence the effectiveness of climate forcing, a finding published in Nature Communications (2016) that has informed assessments of climate sensitivity in polar and continental environments. Satellite-based analyses of urban heat islands across 57 Arctic cities in Fennoscandia further revealed the reach of anthropogenic warming into high-latitude settlements, with important implications for permafrost, ecosystems, and infrastructure. His broader contributions include studies of Bjerknes compensation in the Bergen Climate Model, the role of the Barents Sea in Arctic climate dynamics, and the application of turbulence-resolving models—particularly PALM coupled with Enviro-HIRLAM—to air-quality management in cold-climate cities. Through coordination of the Nordic Council of Ministers’ TRAKT-2018 project and contributions to the Pan-Eurasian Experiment (PEEX) Modelling Platform, he has also promoted the integration of citizen observations, remote sensing, and high-performance computing into comprehensive environmental assessment systems. Professor Esau has established a distinctive research profile at the intersection of boundary-layer physics, Arctic climate science, and urban environmental modelling.