B. B. CaelAssistant Professor

Research Focus:

climate, biogeochemistry

Email:

bbcael@uchicago.edu

Research Interests

I am an Earth system statistician. I use tailored statistical inference to extract simple, robust signals from noisy, heterogeneous Earth system observations. I am interested in Earth’s coupled carbon cycle–climate system, and how humans affect and are affected by it. My primary research areas are:

• Plankton and the ocean’s biological pump
• Climate dynamics in the present and past
• Climate systems engineering
• Fractal geometry of geographical features

Selected Publications 

Cael, B. B., & Foster, G. L. (2026). How unusual was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum?Geophysical Research Letters, 53, e2025GL120456. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL120456

Taylor, K., Ferrari, R., & Cael, B. B. (2026). Modeling variability in vertical profiles of particulate organic carbon flux. Geophysical Research Letters, 53, e2026GL121728. https://doi.org/10.1029/2026GL121728

Oline, M., Hoskins, J., Seekell, D., Silber, M., & Cael, B. B. (2025). Self-Affine Scaling of Earth's Islands. arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.16659. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.16659