Seminar
Title: Adventures with Clouds and Climate: A Scientific Journey
Time: Oct. 21, 2024, 8-9pm EST
Abstract: Clouds are the heart of understanding weather and climate change. Most weather extremes result from cloud processes (hail, tornadoes, tropical cyclones, etc). In addition, the largest uncertainties in understanding the future evolution of climate are also related to clouds through cloud interactions with aerosols, and through cloud feedbacks. I will discuss a scientific journey with clouds at the heart of understanding weather and climate, what we know, what we don't know and where the opportunities lie to make future progress. Clouds are easy to understand, but their complexities make prediction of weather and climate very challenging (and interesting). Along the way I will provide some thoughts on what that journey has meant for me: what I would do again, and what I might do differently, particularly if I was starting the journey again. Science as a career is evolving, hopefully for the better, and we are all a part of that journey.
Brief Bio
Dr. Andrew Gettelman is an Earth Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Prior to joining PNNL in 2022, he spent 23 years at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He specializes in clouds and climate change. The unifying theme of his work is a desire to understand critical issues in the earth system for society, across chemistry, climate and even weather. This includes the development and analysis of global model simulations of the climate system with a focus on the development of physical parameterizations of clouds in global climate models and the physics and chemistry of the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. In addition to developing and managing Earth system models, Gettelman is involved in model evaluation data analysis with satellites and field programs and has served on science teams for both satellite and field projects. Dr. Gettelman is co-chair of the Digital Earth Lighthouse Imitative for the World Climate Research Program. Gettelman has been a visiting professor in Physics in Oxford, an Erskine visiting fellow at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, a visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and a visiting professor in the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland. Gettelman is the author or co-author on over 225 peer reviewed publications and a textbook (Demystifying Climate Models, Springer). Gettelman has a PhD in atmospheric sciences from the University of Washington and a BS in civil engineering from Princeton University. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.
The seminar will be held virtually via Webex, please join the meeting via the following link when it's time.
