He got his bachelor's degree of science along with his master's from the University of L'Aquila in 1982 and four years later received his Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology.
From February to September 1982 he worked as research fellow at the IBM Scientific Center in Rome, Italy.
Since that year he worked as a senior scientist at the Abdus Salams' International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste.
From May 1998 till August 2005 he served as head of the Physics of Weather and Climate Group at the same place and from April 2002 till September 2008 was a vice-chair at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organisation that was a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
[1] In 2018 he received the Alexander von Humboldt Medal from the European Geosciences Union for outstanding research on modelling regional climate change.