
Welcome! I'm Anna Cabré
Climate physicist - Oceanographer
PhD in cosmology and astronomy
Author of children's books
Science for everyone: content creator and communicator
About Me

I am a climate physicist and oceanographer with a background in astronomy and cosmology. I literally went from studying the darkest sites of the Universe to the darkest part of our planet, the deep ocean. The same ocean that is mitigating climate change and which health is crucial for the lives of millions of people.
Studying the Universe gave me the privilege of seeing our planet as a tiny little insignificant dot where lots of beings happen to live. Studying the ocean and climate gave me the feeling of urgency and desperation to protect the delicate balance in our planet, and later on, inspired me to work for a better future. I live in Munich, but most of my life happened in Barcelona and later in Philadelphia.
My goal is to contribute to a fair, sustainable future, one that takes into account the quality of life of future generations and the care for our planet. I have been exploring outside the theoretical world where my research lives (inside the computer) and focussing on having a direct impact. How? Communicating/inspiring/consulting/creating content about our future possiblities as humans, our footprint on Earth, the oceans role in mitigating climate change, climate justice, Antarctica, or women in STEMM. With a special emphasis in visualising the information through data visualization, story books or documentaries. This adventure has brought me to Antarctica and to write two story books for children. Take a look at the last one, written with the Ellas Educan Collective: The secret life of viruses.
If you are interested in any of this blurb, feel free to contact me at any time or keep scrolling.
Short academic bio
- Research associate at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) (July 2018-now)
- Beatriu de Pinós fellow (co-funded with Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions) at the Institute of Marine Sciences (Barcelona) (2016-2018) with J.L. Pelegri
- Postdoctoral researcher at the Dept. of Earth and Environmental Sciences at UPenn (2012-2015), with Irina Marinov (thanks for taking me in!)
- Postdoctoral researcher at the Dept. of Physics at UPenn (2009-2012), with Bhuvnesh Jain
- PhD from the Institute of Space Sciences (Barcelona) in cosmology (2004-2008) (download thesis), with E. Gaztañaga
- Bachelor's Degree in Physics from the University of Barcelona (1998-2003)
Antarctica


Why women? Believe it or not, there is a structural and historical bias that still favors white men. We have united to build a 50-50 future.
I was selected to participate in the one-year long program Homeward Bound which culminated in a 3-week expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula. We are a network of women concerned about the climate emergency and convinced of the fundamental role that women are playing towards a sustainable planet. See this Nature paper that I co-signed together with 289 women to ask for a Marine Protected Area in the Antarctic Peninsula.
Together with the group of several Spanish participants, we have created an association to push forward the climate and gender agenda and generate awareness in Spain (Ellas Lideran). See our OpEd about the role of Spain in the negotiations for a protected area in Antarctica.
Going to Antarctica has been a life-changing experience for me, one that motivated me to write a book for my children and the children of everyone, initially crowdfunded with Verkami and finally published by Zahori Books here (Catalan, Spanish, or English). Mamma goes to Antarctica was illustrated by the amazing Mariona Tolosa Sisteré. I also went around schools to show the kids why we should care about Antarctica until the coronavirus hit us. Now I am planning to give online presentations and guide online activities for children under the project Ambassadors of Antarctica.

With the conviction that I must contribute to the protection of Antarctica, we are producing a documentary with Isaac Lupiáñez about Antarctica, but also about women, climate, maternity, and our duty to build a better future for the generations to come ( teaser in Catalan ).
See an amazing summary of the experience in Antarctica by Emma Kennedy (here ).
This article describes my experience in Antarctica in Catalan ( Catorze.cat ) and here you can see an online exhibition happening in a civic center of Barcelona (Casa Groga).
Climate and Oceanography
I study the output of Earth System Models to understand the large scale spatial and temporal variability of oceanic
and atmospheric climate patterns, once the everyday weather has been averaged out.
I am interested in predicting the mid and long-term changes due to climate warming and to separate these changes from natural variability.
See below the main lines of research I am involved with.
See publications
South Atlantic transfer
We study regions that contribute to the northward heat transfer that occurs in the top 1000m of the Atlantic Ocean. The South Atlantic plays a crucial role in the returning limb of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation that originates with sinking of cold and salty sater in the North Atlantic; the South Atlantic is the only basin that transfers heat equatorward from the subtropics to the tropics to compensate (northward) for the southward export of North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW), but it has traditionally not studied as much as the homologous North Atlantic. We have used a lagrangian technique to track the origin and path of the waters that end up in the subtropical or tropical gyres. We study the volume transport associated to each route, the paths of propagation, the spatial and depth structure of these paths, and the heat and freshwater gain along these pathways. Here a copy of the published paper.
Open-ocean deep convection in the Southern Ocean
During the mid-1970s, a huge hole in the sea ice (polynya) opened during winter in the Weddell Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula, and was observed with satellites that had been launched few years before. The polynya closed and has only reemerged during the last 2 winters. It is open-ocean strong water column mixing that brings relatively warm water from the deep ocean to the surface and melts the ice. All the models that have this mixing events predict a stoppage of mixing with climate warming. We have explored the variability in Southern Ocean surface temperatures that result from pulses in open-ocean deep convection in the Weddell Sea (in the Southern Ocean), with a long 1000-year control experiment with pre-industrial conditions that exhibits strong convective events every ~70 years. We have found that fluctuations in Southern Ocean surface temperatures modify the energetic balance at the top of the atmosphere and the propagation of heat transport in both the atmosphere and the ocean. The atmospheric changes result for example in a weakening of the Southern Ocean westerlies, a warming of the atmosphere, and an increase in precipitation towards the southern tropics. The oceanic changes result in a strengthening of the formation of Antarctic bottom waters, and a weakening of the Meridional Overturning circulation during convective events. See this communication release. Here a copy of the published paper.
Oxygen Minimum Zones in the Pacific
We analyse simulations of the Pacific Ocean oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) from 11 Earth system model contributions to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5, focusing on the mean state and climate change projections. The eastern tropical regions are often low in oxygen due to sluggish ventilation and strong biological activity that consumes lots of oxygen. Oxygen is essential for most types of oceanic life, hence it is crucial to understand these regions and the predicted evolution within the next century. The simulations tend to overestimate the volume of the OMZs, especially in the tropics and Southern Hemisphere. Under the climate change scenario RCP8.5, all simulations yield small and discrepant changes in oxygen concentration at mid depths in the tropical Pacific by the end of the 21st century due to an almost perfect compensation between warming-related decrease in oxygen saturation and decrease in biological oxygen utilization. See publication (pdf)
Phytoplankton modeling
Understanding how global phytoplankton populations
will respond to climate change is critical, since phytoplankton provide the ultimate food source for all
marine organisms and draw down atmospheric CO2 by fixing
inorganic carbon into organic matter via photosynthesis.
We analyzed for the first time all 16 Coupled
Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 models with
explicit marine ecological modules to identify the common
mechanisms involved in projected phytoplankton
biomass, productivity, and organic carbon export changes
over the twenty-first century in the RCP8.5 scenario (years
2080–2099) compared to the historical scenario (years
1980–1999). All models predict decreases in primary and
export production globally of up to 30 % of the historical
value. ("Consistent global responses of marine ecosystems to future climate change across the IPCC AR5 earth system models")
We also analyzed how phytoplankton change in the Southern Ocean. The models predict a zonally banded pattern of phytoplankton abundance and production changes within four regions: the subtropical ( 30 to 40 S), transitional (40 to 50S), subpolar (50 to 65S) and Antarctic (south of 65S) bands. We find that shifts in bottom-up variables (nitrate, iron and light availability) drive changes in phytoplankton abundance and production on not only interannual, but also decadal and 100-year timescales – the timescales most relevant to climate change.
("A latitudinally banded phytoplankton response to 21st century climate change in the Southern Ocean across the CMIP5 model suite")
See this outreach article summarizing our research.
Phytoplankton observations from satellite color data
Recent technological evolution has allowed the observation of phytoplankton abundance from space.
When the Earth is not covered in clouds, satellites can see through to the surface of the Earth,
and transform the ocean color into phytoplankton abundance with algorithms that use Chlorophyll as an indicator of mini-algae presence.
Chlorophyll is a green pigment found in plants, responsible for absorbing the light needed for the photosynthesis.
Hence, greener parts of the ocean have more biological productivity.
However, Chl and phytoplankton abundance do not follow a linear relation, as Chlorophyll can photoadapt differently depending on the light, nutrients, and temperature.
I have been working with Tihomir Kostadinov and the group at UPenn on a novel bio-optical algorithm that retrieves size-partitioned phytoplankton carbon from ocean color satellite data,
independently from Chlorophyll. This alrogithm is based on backscattering; the size of phytoplankton changes the spectrum of the light when scattering.
We have studied the seasonality, interannual variability (associated to well known indices such as 'El Niño'), and long-term trends for phytoplankton and the different sizes in comparison to Chl, and have detected interesting differences across biomes.
Carbon-based phytoplankton size classes retrieved via ocean color estimates of the particle size distribution
Phenology of Size-Partitioned Phytoplankton Carbon-Biomass from Ocean Color Remote Sensing and CMIP5 Models
Inter-comparison of phytoplankton functional type phenology metrics derived from ocean color algorithms and Earth System Models
Effect of climate change on fisheries
Climate change is going to affect the habitat conditions that ultimately affect fisheries. Changes in temperature, stratification of the water column, wind patterns, food supply, all these modify the biomes where fish live. I have collaborated with a group from the Marine Research Division at AZTI that use the output of models to predict how the habitat of tuna, eel, anochovy is going to change in the next 50-100 years. See the recently published paper on 'Historical trends and future distribution of anchovy spawning in the Bay of Biscay'
Publications
Google Scholar
Research Gate
The Universe
I did my doctoral thesis on the large-scale structure of the Universe in the Institute of Space Sciences and a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. My focus was to compare data from large-scale surveys with standard cosmological theories with the objective of determining the best theories (and ruling out theories uncompatible with observations) and constraining the values of the different components of the Universe.
This is my research keyword cloud, created with Scimeter.
See publications in cosmology
Download thesis
Physicists currently believe that the universe is composed basically of dark energy (70%) and dark matter (25%), both unknown components.
The rest is made of known
(baryonic) matter.
The standard cosmological model starts with Big Bang, followed by a rapid period of expansion of the universe called inflation. After that, tiny almost homogeneous fluctuations that conform the primordial universe, start to grow while universe expands now in a relatively slow rhythm. 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the temperature is low enough to make the universe become neutral after the recombination of atoms with electrons. Photons are almost free of interactions since then and reach us in the form of a Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). We can measure the spatial anisotropy spectrum of CMB temperatures and compare it to the expected spectrum of acoustic oscillations. This comparison provides a direct geometrical test from which we can deduce that universe is flat or nearly flat. This can be explained if we introduce a new constituent in the universe apart from matter, the dark energy. Dark energy acts as anti-gravity that accelerates the expansion and is also observed through standard candles Supernovae Ia. Although there is a well motivated model that can explain observations, neither dark matter nor dark energy are known elements, so it is important to use the large amount of newly available data to obtain tighter constraints on the constituents of the universe, the evolution of growth perturbations, the expansion history, and also to explore other alternatives, such as modification of gravity.
I worked with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and with
simulations that were prepared for Dark Energy Survey, that is now ongoing.
I mostly used Luminous Red Galaxies as my favourite tracer of dark matter. These galaxies are
intrinsically bring and hence can be seen further away and trace a larger volume than normal galaxies.
I studied the redshift space distortions that arise due to the peculiar motion of galaxies,
when shifts in the light spectrum due to the movement of galaxies are confused with the shifts due to the expansion of the Universe.
These distortions are one of the ways that cosmologists have to study directly the growth of perturbations in the space-time.
I also worked on the Integrated Sachs Wolfe effect (ISW), another direct way to study the growth trhough the evolution of gravitational potentials.
ISW is detected when cross-correlating the remote cosmic microwave map with any more recent map that traces Large Scale Structure.
Photons from the CMB can be modified when passing through the potential wells created by the large scale strucutre, if for example these potentials change with time.
We can detect dark energy thanks to ISW, since we need a dark energy dominated universe to have an evolution of gravitational wells (although this could also be achieved by having a non-flat universe). Luminous Red Galaxies galaxies also allowed us to detect the baryon acoustic peak in the averaged correlation function, and we also detected it in the line-of-sight direction, which means a direct calculation of the Hubble constant! I also worked with photometric surveys (angular projections, photometric redshifts). I worked on modeling weak gravitational lensing as a way to also determine the dark matter in the Universe. Light from far away galaxies is bended when passing through all the dark matter between them and us. Finally, I was studying how to detect (or rule out) a type of modified gravity in dwarf (small) galaxies.
Publications
ADS publication list
astro-ph archive
Communication
Mamma goes to Antarctica
Mamma goes to Antarctica is a love story for my children. It's a childhood dream come true. It's my way of explaining to them what I do when I am not being their mamma, what I care about and what I am doing for the Earth that they are going to inherit. It's a call to climate action for 3 year olds. And a call to protect the amazing creatures of Antarctica. The book was originally crowdfunded, but finally got published by Zahori (in English, Catalan, and Spanish)
The secret life of viruses
Viruses are suddenly the main characters in our lives. For this reason I wrote, together with 5 other women scientists from the association Ellas Lideran, the children's book The secret life of viruses during the first coronavirus confinement (March-June 2020). This work is illustrated by Mariona Tolosa Sisteré, the amazing illustrator who illustrated Mamma goes to Antarctica. The book is now for sale in Spain (by Zahorí ), Italy, France, Slovenia, Poland, Netherlands, and soon out in English speaking countries, Korea, China, or Russia.

Tornar a començar (Start over again)
We are producing a documentary with Isaac Lupiáñez. Tornar a començar is a project that was born among a group of people (now friends) concerned about the future that we leave to our children (screenwriter, video editor, musician, scientist, producer). It is about Antarctica, climate, women, maternity, children, action and hope for a better future ( teaser in Catalan ).
Creation of scientific content for the general public
I've been always passionate about communicating my research and science. I am an advocate of science for everyone. I have participated in blogs, articles, and even took a journalism class. I am interested in creating/summarising content for children (as I've done for 2 children books) and also for adults in the topics of climate, oceans, career change from astronomy to oceanography, Antarctica, gender equality, women in STEMM, our footprint on Earth. See some of my writeups.
- "Protecting the Antarctic Peninsula: a global leadership opportunity for Spain", OpEd by Ellas Lideran (Spanish) (El Pais )
- "Oceans and women" (Spanish) ( ICM Divulga )
- "Anna Cabré: cosmos, climate, and sea" (Spanish) ( Oceánicas )
- Regular blogger for the online journal Investigación y Ciencia , Spanish edition of Scientific American, 2014-2015. See my articles in the section 'About oceans and climate change' (Spanish)
- Regular contributor to the Spanish newspaper Última Hora with popular science articles in the section
I am not a science person... (everything you ever wanted to know but you did not happen to ask), 2009-2011. See some articles below (Spanish)
Is there life outside the Earth?
Large Hadron Collider
Gravitational lenses
In the era of the planets
Modifications to Einstein's theory of gravity
Talks
I love giving talks to children and adults who want to learn. Actually, I think that everyone wants to learn new things, it's just that sometimes we scientists are boring and criptic as hell. See here some examples.
- "Científicos contra el cambio climático" (Spanish) ( Science Truck, FECYT )
- "Los océanos y la igualdad de género como vías para la sostenibilidad" (Spanish) ( Reset the Planet )
- "Climate change, where does all the heat go?" ( Munich Soapbox )
- "The role of oceans in mitigating the impact of climate change", Delaware State University (NASA Innovations in Climate Education, NICE), Dover, Delaware USA, March 2014. See talk here
- Outreach for general public in science fiction, nature and mathematics, at public libraries and primary schools of Barcelona, 2007-2009.
See some talks below (Catalan)
The Universe for children
The wonders of nature (based on exhibition in Cosmocaixa)
Space travel
Media outreach: TV, radio, newspapers
- Radio: A l’Antàrtida tens la sensació de ser en un altre planeta (Catalan) ( Via Lliure, RAC1 )
- News: Entrevista a Anna Cabré, Científica y autora del libro Mamá se va a la Antártida (Spanish) ( El Club del Pequeño Activista, Zahorí Books )
- News: La nevera del planeta s'està desfent (Catalan) ( Ara.cat )
- TV: Expedición a la Antártida (Spanish) ( Para todos La 2, TV2 )
- Radio: Anna Cabré de expedición a la Antártida (Spanish) ( El gallo que no cesa - RNE )
- News: Una física catalana viaja a la Antártida en una expedición internacional (Spanish) ( La Vanguardia )
- News: Siete científicas españolas van a la Antártida (Spanish) ( El Diario Vasco )
- News: A casa, molt soroll i molta gent (Catalan) ( Ara.cat Criatures )
- Campaign: Cambia la energía, no el clima (Spanish) ( GreenPeace Campaign )
- News: Las científicas españolas que luchan contra el cambio climático (Spanish) ( Mujeres a seguir )
- News: Estas mujeres son las protagonistas en la lucha contra el cambio climático (Spanish) ( Yo Dona, El Mundo )
- Radio: La primera pedra (Catalan) ( RAC1 radio )
- News Event: Homenaje a la científica Josefina Castellví (Spanish) ( Levante )
- News Event: Dones líders per un futur sostenible (Catalan) ( ESCI UPF News )
- News: Científicas e innovadoras liderando la lucha contra el cambio climático (Spanish) ( Ameco Press )
- Radio: Científicas contra el cambio climático (Spanish) ( Cadena Ser 'A vivir' )
- TV: Sabem més de l’univers que dels oceans (Catalan) ( Barcelona TV Terrícoles )
- Radio: Dones de mar (Catalan) ( El Far Radio )