Michael Ghil (Hebrew: מייקל גיל; born 10 June 1944 in Budapest, Hungary)[1] is an American and European mathematician and physicist, focusing on the climate sciences and their interdisciplinary aspects.

[4] Since October 2003 until today, he is a Distinguished Research Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Starting from the work of Budyko[10] and Sellers,[11] Ghil proposed a 1D Energy Balance Model able to provide a succinct but essentially correct description of the climate system.

[12] Ghil's analysis complemented the ones by Budyko and Sellers and played a key role for understanding the multistability of the Earth system, which features competing snowball and warm states.

[14] Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Ghil contributed to the development of data assimilation techniques in meteorology and oceanography,[15] and to the theory of low-frequency variability of the atmosphere (with a special emphasis on the study of blocking), as well as to the understanding of large-scale ocean dynamics.

Recently, Ghil proposed the pullback attractor as a mathematical framework able to encompass the random and time-dependent nature of the climate system.