Deep Convection

Shortly after Hurricane Otis hit Mexico in late October 2023 after a very rapid (and poorly forecast) intensification, Adam sat down with Frank Marks from NOAA's Hurricane Research Division (HRD) for the last episode of this season. Frank is one of the central figures in the world of hurricane science. With a career spanning over four decades at the Hurricane Research Division (HRD) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Frank has been instrumental in advancing our understanding of hurricanes and improving their forecasts.Frank's journey with HRD, including two decades as its director, has been dedicated to unraveling the inner workings of hurricanes, with the objective of improving their forecasts (which are not made by the HRD, but by the National Hurricane Center). This pursuit has led Frank to fly through the eyes of over 100 different storms, crossing the eye of a hurricane more than 500 times. "Sitting at a desk and writing papers and doing analysis, that's also enjoyable, but there's nothing like getting out in the environment [...] I always try and encourage even my numerical modeling partners to come on a flight so they can see what it takes to get the information that they need , and almost all of them step away from that with a different perspective. […] There's nothing like breaking out into the eye and seeing mother nature in all her glory or just flying to the storm and seeing the halos from the rain falling down. The natural beauty is there, and the thing about a hurricane is, you go from the most wonderful weather into the worst thing you can imagine in a very short time, and out the other side, and you do that repeatedly." However, reducing Frank's career to just these flights would be an understatement. He is a distinguished scientist with 139 published papers to his name and a mentor who has guided many junior scientists. His contributions to the field have earned him numerous accolades, reflecting his deep and broad contribution to hurricane science. One of Frank's most notable achievements has been the development and application of airborne Doppler radar technology. This innovation has allowed for an unprecedented view of hurricane structures, playing a crucial role in improving hurricane intensity forecasts through the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, which Frank conceived and led. This project represents a significant national effort to tackle the challenge of predicting hurricane intensity more accurately, a crucial factor in safeguarding lives and property. Frank’s conversation with Adam traces his path from his early interest in meteorology as a high schooler in New York's Hudson Valley, through his graduate studies at MIT, and on to his long-standing tenure at NOAA since 1980. Frank's story is not just about the science; it's also about the institutions, the art of scientific communication, and his approach to addressing some of the more outlandish ideas about hurricane intervention (like using nuclear weapons). Throughout the discussion, Frank’s humility shines through. He continually acknowledges the contributions of his mentors, colleagues, and team members, emphasizing the collaborative nature of scientific progress. He attributes his success to not only his own efforts but also to being at the right place at the right time and seizing the opportunities presented to him. The interview with Frank Marks was recorded in October 2023. Image credit: NOAA Frank's website at NOAA/HRD

Bjorn Stevens’ main scientific interest is in the role of clouds in the climate system. He established himself early in his career as a leader in the study of marine stratus-topped boundary layers. That eventually led him to a broader climate research agenda. And since about 2008, Bjorn heads one of the world’s most prominent climate modeling labs, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. In that position, with his team there and many collaborators, he has produced an enormous volume of important research, and that’s not to mention the countless additional studies that use the data his lab contributes to the CMIP archives.Bjorn’s personal story is as fascinating as his professional achievements. Born in Germany, he first moved to the US when he was only a few months old, and from then on he and his family kept moving a lot for his father’s work. Because of that, his education ended up being “a bit of a patchwork”, but he soon realized that he felt drawn to the beauty of math and science: “Science opened itself up as something that I seemed reasonably good at, and I felt the rewards of doing it. It had this wonderful mix of being creative work, and it had an aesthetic to it. It involved many different skills from writing to analyzing to programming, so it was just something I [...] realized and enjoyed, and I had a certain amount of success that allowed me to continue.” Bjorn did indeed continue, from his PhD at Colorado State and early career at NCAR and UCLA, to his current position as managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. His research covers many topics, but a particular focus have been clouds—he has studied them as a modeler and as a theorist, and he has led many field campaigns to collect data that improve our understanding of these elusive yet critical components of the climate system. “How does precipitation affect the clouds? There were some simple hypotheses at the time […] which didn't make sense to me, and so I tried to understand how drizzle affects the development of the cloud layer. So that was mostly my PhD thesis, and at that time I was really concerned with how to use models to come up with ideas that we could test in observations. So I think that's also an enduring aspect of the way I think about things, which is not to use models to provide answers but to use models to tell us how to look at nature differently.” Bjorn’s leadership role in the global climate science community goes well beyond his astonishing scientific productivity. He has a unique gift for starting, leading and facilitating important and sometimes difficult scientific conversations.And currently, Bjorn is doing this in a bigger way than ever before, as he leads an international effort to develop the Earth Virtualization Engine, or EVE. EVE is conceived as a large international collaboration, taking CERN—the particle physics facility—as a model. EVE’s proposed mission is to develop kilometer-scale, that is, ultra high-resolution global climate models, using the biggest computers that exist, and use them to support climate services worldwide. You’ll hear Adam and Bjorn spend quite a bit of time talking about that towards the end of their conversation. The interview with Bjorn Stevens was recorded in September 2023. Image credit: MPI-M, D. Ausserhofer Bjorn's website at Max-Planck-Institut

Adam answers listener questions!

In this episode we take a break from guest interviews. Instead, Adam explains in detail how the podcast got started, how and why we do it, and who is involved. Just like when you go to any web site or anything and there's an "About" link, this is that, except via 40 minutes of talking.

Arlene Fiore got interested in air pollution first as a kid in the Boston suburbs, partly because she suffered from bad asthma, and that taught her that the air can be harmful. Even though her interest in the Earth’s atmosphere was there from an early age on, the path that led her to her current position as a professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences was, in her own words, a circuitous one, partly because of life's inherent unpredictability and coincidences, but also because of Arlene's wide array of interests. When it came to thinking about what to do in college, she struggled to make a decision: "And then when I was thinking about college I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I mean, I really had broad interests—I liked history, I liked math and science, I liked English. […] The things that I started thinking about though were really probably more geared towards engineering, and that was because my dad was an engineer. I was [also] pretty serious about track and cross country running, [and so] I was trying to find places where I could run and do all these things. In the end I applied to a bunch of places, and my mom had really wanted to see if I could get into Harvard, and so I applied there and I vividly remember telling her she was wasting her $50 application fee because there was no way." Those $50, as history would have it, became a pivotal investment in Arlene's life—she got into Harvard, where it was eventually the earth and planetary science courses that captivated her, and where she soon started to do research in atmospheric chemistry in Daniel Jacob’s group. She ended up staying at Harvard for a PhD, a decision that had taken some nudging by those around her, who saw Arlene’s potential more clearly than she saw it herself. Arlene has become an expert in atmospheric chemistry, air pollution, atmospheric transport, and climate. She uses numerical models to understand all the different factors that influence the concentration of constituents that affect human health, especially ozone. Her early work was about defining the “background” ozone that sets the floor for air quality regulations, and especially understanding the role of long-range transport of ozone itself as well as its precursors. Her work has uncovered linkages between air quality and climate change, for example by highlighting the role of methane, a greenhouse gas, in regulating ground level ozone. And she’s made important contributions on a range of other topics, including not just chemistry but, more lately, physical climate, including extreme events. From the beginning Arlene’s research has had direct implications for policy. Translating between the abstract world of atmospheric chemistry and the concrete realities of policy and regulation, Arlene has been working with a range of stakeholders to influence regulation and practice at the federal, state and local levels. Yet she does this stakeholder-engaged policy work while remaining a highly productive basic researcher whose work contributes to fundamental understanding. Listening to Arlene, you’ll notice that she has a rare combination of personal talent and a profound commitment to collective scientific progress, and an ability to shine while ensuring others do too. The interview with Arlene Fiore was recorded in September 2023. Image credit: Steph Stevens website of Arlene's group at MIT

Aglaé Jézéquel's journey began surrounded by books, in a home where knowledge was cherished. Aglaé shared her parents’ passion from an early age on, but while her family was more into literature, she fell in love with science. Her academic path has led her to her current position as a scientist at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she does research spanning climate science and social science. She is not a climate scientist whose work extends into social science, or a social scientist who collaborates with climate scientist—no, she’s genuinely a physical climate scientist and a social scientist at the same time. Her PhD thesis had roughly equal components of both, and she writes legitimate research papers in both. It’s not just methodological, though. When Aglaé talks, her scientific curiosity comes across as inextricable from her desire to do something about the climate problem, and as part of that, to understand both the earth system and the human, social processes involved. She has made multiple substantive contributions to the methodology, both its statistical aspects, and meteorological questions like how to characterize the atmospheric circulation of events in a way that makes attribution more effective. Aglaé has worked a lot on extreme event attribution, that is, the science of relating individual extreme weather events to climate change. She has made multiple substantive contributions to the methodology, both its statistical aspects, and meteorological questions like how to characterize the atmospheric circulation of events in a way that makes attribution more effective. But she has also studied how attribution science is used by those outside the scientific community, and in the space between the physical and social science dimensions, Aglaé has contributed in major ways to the discussion about the relationship between the two major types of attribution, "storyline" and "risk" approaches. For many in the climate science field, there's a palpable tension between pure scientific curiosity and the aspiration to effect real-world change. Thanks to her natural ability to integrate these two spheres, this tension seems to be much less present for Aglaé—and probably also for many young scientists of her and future generations. "One thing I've realized is that you have two different motivations as a scientist […], one is curiosity and the other one is social usefulness, and they generally don't really align. And you have to be okay with that. They can align to a point but they don’t entirely, and I think it's important to be aware of that. And then [...] I try to think not only as myself, but as what does a society wants from scientists and why are we paid by the state to do science. […] I [try to be] relevant as a scientist for society." The interview with Aglaé Jézéquel was recorded in August 2023. Aglaé's website at ENS

Sarah Kapnick's journey in the climate world has not been a conventional one. Starting as a "math nerd in the Midwest", her path meandered through investment banking, back to academia for a PhD., and now to one of the most influential positions in US climate science and policy - Chief Scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Sarah's initial foray into the world of finance might seem unorthodox for a climate scientist, but in reality, it was a preview of the broader understanding she would bring to the field. At Goldman Sachs, she learned how to structure catastrophe bonds, a financial instrument intrinsically linked to climate-related events such as hurricanes. Sarah realized that accurately quantifying the risk of such events requires an understanding of how their probabilities of occurring in the present-day climate may differ from their historically observed occurrence probabilities. So, she decided to go back to academia and become an expert in this field. She first went to UCLA to do a PhD and then on to NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton. Here, Sarah was at the forefront of developing climate models, forecasting climate patterns from mere months to many decades into the future. At the same time, she kept doing some research at the intersection of climate and economics. After her decade-long stint at GFDL she went back to another bank, before getting recruited to be NOAA Chief Scientist. What distinguishes Sarah beyond her scientific credentials is her ability to bridge disparate worlds, and to merge science, finance, and leadership. Her return to NOAA as Chief Scientist comes at a pivotal moment. With climate changes already upon us, the need for informed, integrated action has never been more pressing – and Sarah is a great person to drive the transition from identifying climate problems to actively developing solutions. She emphasizes the interdependence of user-driven and basic science in making that transition happen: "We still need our basic research, but we also need to transform, because if we are going to deal with the manifestations of climate change, which are going to continue happening and continue to get worse and continue to evolve in the coming years and decades until emissions reach zero, we need to prepare and know what to do. And so the science needs to continue, needs to be fundamental because that drives the [creation of] models that can actually do things that are actionable." The interviews with Sarah Kapnick were recorded in March 2023. Image credit: NOAA/GFDL Sarah's website at NOAA

Growing up outside Braunschweig, just on the west side of the border with East Germany during the Cold War, Tapio Schneider spent a lot of his teenage years doing sports, and skiing (often just meters away from the East German border patrol) became a large part of his life. He also had a keen interest in science and a desire to understand the world around him, and so he decided to study physics and math---he did that at the University of Freiburg, a school he picked in no small part due to its close proximity to the Black Forest, which meant that he could continue to ski as much as possible. Science became more and more important to him though, and after he came to the US (with what was supposed to be an exchange fellowship, but Tapio ended up not going back to Germany), his career quickly took off, starting from his PhD with Isaac Held (a previous guest on the podcast) at Princeton and on to his current position at Caltech. The array of topics on which Tapio has made major contributions, and the magnitude and impact of those contributions are astonishing. After his early, field-changing work on the general circulation of the atmosphere, Tapio did a whole set of studies on planetary atmospheres. And then he got into marine stratocumulus, and the parameterization of those clouds in models. This led him to studies of clouds and climate more broadly, and eventually to rethinking how climate models should work from the ground up. On top of that, Tapio's early work on statistical methods, though just an aside for him, have become hugely influential papers for statisticians and scientists alike. For the last few years, Tapio has been leading the CliMA project at Caltech. A visionary endeavor, the project aims to bring about a paradigm shift in the way climate models are constructed and used. It advocates for a more holistic approach, making use of observations, machine learning, and high-resolution simulations. The inception of CliMA came from a series of workshops on the future of Earth system modeling. They ended up being a lot of fun and very interesting. […] Each time, it was like 30-some people, perhaps. So it was fairly small, [and] you could interact intensely with everyone. And we we were just trying to ask the question, "So suppose you don't have to deal with these layers upon layers of history on climate models, how would you go about building a climate model now if you could?" And it was really meant as a hypothetical at the time. There wasn't any plan to build a climate model. The plan came later, and it turned into CliMA. As with any pioneering venture, the road hasn’t always been easy, but Tapio has an exceptional ability to treat challenges just as problems to be solved step-by-step—and to not lose sight of the big picture while doing so. The interview with Tapio was recorded in December 2022. Tapio's website at Caltech Website of the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA)

In keeping with this season’s excursions away from Deep Convection’s traditional focus on climate science, this episode features Abhisheik Dhawan. While he's not a climate scientist, his innovative ideas intersect with climate change, development, and finance in a unique way. He is currently a Sustainable Finance and Partnerships Specialist at the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), an organization that focuses on providing essential financial support to the world’s least developed countries. In that role, Abhisheik is responsible for coming up with innovative mechanisms for providing sustainable finance to the world’s poorest countries. And the mechanism he has come up with is called Climate Insurance Linked Resilient Infrastructure Finance, or CILRIF. The premise of CILRIF is to grant long-term insurance to cities against weather and climate related calamities, such as floods and storms. Then, when cities actively invest in resilience or adaptation methods, they receive a cut in the premium. So CILRIF’s ultimate aim is to assign a tangible price tag to climate adaptation in urban settings, thus unlocking capital for it. While it might sound fairly straightforward, this is in some ways quite a radical proposal. For instance, the long-term contracts it proposes are nearly unheard of in the world of property insurance. CILRIF is not operational yet, but for nearly three years, Abhisheik has been at the helm of a volunteer working group, collaborating with insurers, academics, engineers, and finance experts to set the CILRIF wheels in motion. "[What we want] is resilient cities, whatever that means for that city. [...] You need to define for every city on the planet, […] what is the extreme climate it is most exposed to? We don't want to look at financing for regular floods […] which have been happening every year […]. But looking at a 200-year flood […], which will have a devastating effect on a community, how do you protect from that? And actually if you protect from that, then you will automatically reduce the damage from regular floods as well." Of course, Adam also talks with Abhisheik about his whole life and career, starting with his origins in Lucknow/India, his training and early employment as a mining engineer, how he transitioned to finance and then made it to the US, to do a graduate degree at Columbia, and then into his current role. The interview with Abhisheik was recorded in March 2023.  Abhisheik's website at the UNCD

Bob Kopp’s academic roots lie in the realms of paleoclimate, paleobiology, and ecology. But, inspired by a legacy of public service passed down from his parents, he soon gravitated towards areas where science meets actionable change. Over the course of his career, he has learned to master the dance of blending use-inspired, policy-oriented research with traditional academia. Today, Bob is a professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University, but that role is just one of many hats he wears: He is also Co-Director of the University Office of Climate Action, and he directs the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub. And as if that weren't enough, he is also a driving force behind the Climate Impacts Lab. This consortium has pioneered an integrated assessment model, which now influences the EPA's estimates of the social cost of carbon—an important metric for assessing climate impacts of federal policies. As Adam and Bob delve into their conversation, they traverse the challenges and rewards of Bob’s diverse career—from his enriching interdisciplinary postdoc to the Department of Energy, and even to the challenges of today’s climate policy in the US. They touch upon the setbacks, like the Waxman-Markey act's failure, as well as on milestones such as the Inflation Reduction Act. They also talk about the difficulty and obstacles in doing policy-oriented research while remaining viable as an academic (something that Bob has managed to do to a remarkable degree), and about the importance and undervaluation of boundary workers: "In this case, the boundary is between researchers who have the science, and policymakers or community members who have decisions they're trying to make, […] like how high we should require houses to be built. You can look at [this problem] from the perspective of the municipal government, or you can look at it from the perspective of sea level scientists. But [...] you need people in the middle who [...] are fluent talking to scientists and who are fluent talking to non-scientists. And who are helping helping the two of them have discussions that can inform the decisions and shape the science that is done." The interview with Bob was recorded in December 2022. Image credit: Rutgers University Bob's website at Rutgers University, and his personal website

In the second episode of this season, we're branching out from the traditional, science-centered sphere of Deep Convection and into a world captured through the lens of Manila-born photojournalist, Hannah Reyes Morales. Hannah and Adam crossed paths a dinner at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, where they found themselves immersed in a discussion sparked by shared interests: the relentless typhoons that shape life in the Philippines. From a young age, Hannah was enchanted by the vibrant pages of National Geographic magazines at her home in Manila. A career as a photographer for such an esteemed publication seemed as far-fetched to her as becoming an astronaut, yet this dream became her reality. Her journey is a blend of happenstance, grit, and an immense passion for her craft, leading her to places and stories all over the world. "When I was a kid I lived in a very cloistered environment. Manila in the 90s was not—I mean it's arguably still not the safest place, but Manila in the 90s was a little more crazy. And so I wasn't really allowed to play outside. [...] I spent a lot of my time indoors and photography for me was one of the ways where I really felt like I could explore and, you know, tickle my imagination—all those worlds that seemed so far away and yet so near through a photograph. That was something that I truly fell in love with." Hannah's work documents the resilience of struggling communities across Asia, often focusing on the personal narratives unfolding under the impact of inequality, poverty, and injustice. One story that gets highlighted here is about women in the Philippines propelled into the sex trade by the losses suffered during Typhoon Haiyan. Hannah also talks about Emerging Islands, a unique initiative she co-founded to facilitate collaborations between artists and scientists, focusing on the thematic intersections of oceans, nature, and climate. Finally, she and Adam have a profound discussion about their shared experiences as researchers and storytellers. They question the purpose and impact of their work, particularly when they confront misinformation or indifference. The interview with Hannah was recorded in November 2022. Hannah's website featuring examples of her photos and stories.

Rebecca Morss' scientific credentials are impeccable – a PhD in atmospheric science from MIT, more than 20 years of experience at the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology (MMM) Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and currently the Senior Scientist and Deputy Director of the center. But what really sets Rebecca apart is her focus on the intersection between scientific information and its use by people.Rebecca is an expert in weather forecasting systems and risk communication, and she specializes in high-impact weather including hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes. Her research isn’t limited to the intricacies of weather phenomena and prediction, but extends to how forecasts are formulated, communicated, received, and acted upon. For Rebecca, science is not a solitary endeavor but a bridge that connects researchers, societal stakeholders, and policy-makers alike.Despite the importance of weather predictions in preserving lives and property, ensuring that people understand these forecasts and know how to act upon them has often been overlooked and underfunded. In her conversation with Adam, Rebecca talks about how she has retained her unique identity as a physical scientist while navigating the challenges of this inherently interdisciplinary sphere:"There's a lot of counterincentives. I've been to workshops on interdisciplinary research [...] in a variety of fields, and if you talk to professors at universities, even if they wanna do this, there's so many barriers to doing it, there's so many disincentives. The best way to get ahead if you're in a research career is to publish a lot of papers and get a lot of citations. And the best way to do that is to do something that other people are doing, and to not buck the trend. It takes a lot longer to learn new things every time. People aren't citing you if no one else is doing it."Adam's and Rebecca's discussion then pivots to two recent extreme weather events. First, Hurricane Ian, where an evacuation order delay resulted in tragic loss of life in Lee County/Florida. Second, the Marshall Fire of December 2021, a disaster that literally hit close to home for Rebecca. The fire ravaged her neighborhood in Boulder County, Colorado, coming perilously close to her own house, and giving her a first-hand experience of the crucial role of effective risk communication.The interview with Rebecca was recorded in October 2022.Rebecca's website at NCAR

It's been almost a year since our last episode, and we're thrilled to announce the arrival of Season 4! In our season opener, Adam and Melanie reconvene, checking in on each other's lives and exploring some detours---much like in previous seasons, this is the warm-up for 10 more episodes of Deep Convection. Expect an array of diverse guests, each contributing a unique perspective to our ongoing exploration of the interwoven tapestry of climate science, humanity, and our shared experience of this moment in history. Until then, stay tuned and be sure to hit the subscribe button to get all future episodes right as they drop. You can also catch up on previous seasons in the episode archive.   Image credit: DALL·E 2

Gabe Vecchi’s research spans a remarkably wide range of topics: he started as an oceanographer, and studied intraseasonal variability in the Pacific, before moving to the Indian Ocean, and then, when he moved to Princeton in the 2000s, to a range of atmospheric problems, including a critically important paper on the influence of global warming on the tropical Walker circulation. And then Gabe got into hurricanes, a topic on which he’s been a key player for a decade and a half now. He has made important contributions not just on those topics, but on a dizzying array of others that one can see on his truly remarkable publication list. Gabe’s work spans ocean and atmosphere, tropical and extratropical, weather and climate, basic and applied, and nearly every other dichotomy in this field one can think of. In fact, Gabe says that to keep things fresh, scientists should be forced to change the topics they work on every 10 years. He himself certainly loves to seek out new problems and projects, but he somehow manages to do that without having to drop the old problems he used to work on. Hallmarks of Gabe’s work, and as you’ll hear, Gabe himself, are freshness, openness to new ideas, and openness to what the data say for that matter, and overall the lack of pretense that he brings to science, and to life. Gabe’s story really starts in Venezuela. After being born in Boston, he spent most of his childhood there, moving back to the USA, and New Jersey in particular, when he was 16, fleeing the runaway inflation, deterioration of living standards, and other difficulties that came with the Chavez regime. You can’t hear Gabe’s Venezuelan background in his perfect American accent, which he describes learning from TV shows as a high school student. But it gives him a particular perspective on what’s happening in the US now, and at the end of the episode he and Adam get into what the US democracy’s accelerating failures do and don’t have in common with Venezuela’s. Gabe’s scientific career led him from his undergraduate studies at Rutgers to graduate school at the University of Washington, and then from NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle to its Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton. He was a civil servant for a number of years before moving across the street a few years ago to become professor in the Geosciences department at Princeton University, where he’s also Director of The High Meadows Environmental Institute and Deputy Director of the Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System. Apart from talking about science, Gabe and Adam also discuss the challenges of communicating their science to the media, what kinds of climate science do and don’t matter to real-world mitigation or adaptation efforts, and other issues that they’ve both struggled with. And Gabe gives advice on how to make important decisions: "So many of the things that affect the paths that we take are so totally out of our control, even totally invisible to us, that spending too much time planning beyond making sure that you're not making a really obviously bad decision is, I think, a waste of energy. And it keeps you from discovering things." He applied that decision-making philosophy for example when he had to decide where he wanted to go for graduate school: "I had winnowed down the choice to two places. One was Washington and one was another place on the West Coast. And so, the reason I chose Washington... And this I'll stand behind. This is the way to make decisions. I winnowed it down to two good options, and then I chose something almost arbitrary to make the distinction, and what I chose was where my dog would be happier. [...] Moving past the decision as fast as possible and in a way that was as amusing and stress-free as possible to me was the way to do it. So, thinking about what my dog would have wanted was that." Besides being an amazingly productive and influential scientist whose impacts are both broad and deep...

In-Sik Kang’s career in climate science started about half a century ago, and it has been remarkable in many ways—scientifically, but also in that In-Sik has spent most of his life in a country that started from very little, in climate science and every other way, having been devastated by war right at the start of his life. In-Sik is a long-time global leader in climate modeling, climate variability, seasonal climate prediction and atmosphere-ocean interaction. He built a large and amazingly successful group over several decades as a professor at Seoul National University. At SNU, he and his students built an original atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, or climate model, one of very few University groups to do that in-house in the modern era where it tends to happen only in national labs, and they also turned this into a state-of-the-art seasonal prediction system. The many generations of students that he trained now fill academic and research positions in Korea, the US and elsewhere. Like almost no other scientist in the field, In-Sik has been a tireless organizer and builder of scientific collaboration and scientific institutions internationally. He has done this through service on many international committees and panels; through his long-time affiliation with the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy; and through his work as an advisor, formally and informally, to climate scientists in many developing countries. Having grown up in a poor country himself, In-Sik can relate to their struggles, but he is also keen to underline the importance of self-responsibility: "And then I ask them immediately, "Can you change your country? Can you change your institution? And can you change your professor? Of course, no, right? So that [means] you should change yourself.” Most recently he helped the founders of the Center of Excellence for Climate Change Research at the King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia to get that center started. For all this work, in 2021 In-Sik was awarded the IMO prize, the highest award given by the World Meteorological Association. In-Sik’s family came from North Korea, but fled to the South just before his birth to escape communism and war. So In-Sik grew up in Busan, at the southern tip of South Korea, during a time when the country was poor to a degree that’s hard to grasp if you only know it from recent decades. But he got an education at SNU, the nation’s top University, became a weather forecaster in the military, and then, by a serendipitous connection, got admitted as a graduate student at Oregon State University in the US. He did so well there that he finished in just a little over 3 years, and got a postdoctoral position to work with Isaac Held at GFDL, despite not having published any papers yet. From there In-Sik got a faculty position back at SNU, and the rest is history. But In-Sik’s own story, as he’s the first to point out, runs parallel to, and in some ways exemplifies that of his country, as both rose from poverty and hardship to amazing, globally recognized success, through talent, intense hard work, and a profound belief in the importance of education. The interview with In-Sik Kang was recorded in February 2022. Image credit: SIO

Born to a space physicist father, Andy Dessler was steeped in science and academia from birth. Unlike other children of successful academics, he never perceived his father’s profession and the implicit expectations put on him as a burden, but soon decided that science was what he wanted to do as well. Andy describes how his career was strongly influenced, at many critical junctures (including where to go to grad school) by his dad. So this keeps with a little theme of parents and children that we seem to have this season. Andy and Adam are more or less contemporaries and have quite a few things in common. They both started out working in the stratosphere, on topics related to the ozone problem. In fact the first scientific seminar Adam went to as a new graduate student was given by Andy, right after his own thesis defense. So this was a conversation between two people who understand each other pretty well. The ozone problem was more or less solved by the time Andy was a postdoc, and so, wanting to be where the action was, he switched, and started working on tropospheric water vapor, and from there he got into climate change. This continues to be a theme in Andy’s research: he works on something for a while, but when he senses it’s tapped out, he changes direction, and he’s done this a few times. Perhaps all scientists do this, but Andy has done it more consciously and maybe more often than others. I tell graduate students that all the time, I say, "In 10 or 15 years, you're not gonna be working on this. So you need to learn how to do research." If you know how to do research, you can do anything, that's really the key: to come up with hypotheses, read the literature, do stuff like that... […] There's a huge amount of data out there, just mountains of data that you can download, and it's really exciting. I'm having a great time.” At least as much as for his scientific research, Andy stands out for his public engagement. For many years, he has been writing and speaking to broad audiences about climate. He has written blogs, op-eds, books, and he’s active on social media. He hasn’t shied away from the political, despite having told himself, early in his career, that he would. So he and Adam talk about how that happened, including the time he spent, early in his career, at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In the last couple of years, Andy’s research has moved into climate impacts. He’s studying the Texas power grid, for example, and generally looking for ways to understand the risks due to extreme weather events and climate change, and to contribute to climate adaptation. Making this shift, at this point in time and in their careers, is another thing he and Adam have in common. The interview with Andy Dessler was recorded in February 2022.  @AndrewDessler on Twitter Andy's website at Texas A&M

Growing up on Long Island, Sandra Yuter loved to go on field trips—she learned about how glaciers had shaped the environment around her and was fascinated by how the resulting landscape still told the history of its geological past. The combination of scientific exploration and imagination that these field trips offered was something Sandra also drew to science fiction, another passion that she shares with Adam.Sandra has turned her interest in science into a career; she is a distinguished professor at the department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at North Carolina State University. Her research uses measurements made by remote sensors, including radar, satellite, and lidar, as well as in situ measurements, to understand processes in the atmosphere, especially those related to clouds and precipitation. And occasionally, she even gets to be a bit of a science fiction writer herself:And it turned out I was particularly good at writing proposals and my lab manager [...] explained that proposal writing is a lot like writing science fiction because you're basing it on what's here today, but you're sort of pushing the technology a bit. […] If you think about my interest and all my background reading in hard science fiction, which is what's gonna be going on 10 years from now, or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now, you could sort of translate that to, "Okay, given what we can do right now, what can we do two years from now or five years from now?"Sandra has made important advances on a wide range of meteorological problems, including the structure, dynamics, and cloud microphysics of deep convection in the tropics; shallow stratocumulus-topped boundary layers; and winter storms in the extratropics.Methodologically, Sandra’s work has contributed to the algorithms used to retrieve precipitation from satellite measurements, and to the diagnostic methods used to infer physical processes in precipitating clouds from radar observations. As one particularly prominent example, the contoured frequency by altitude diagram, or CFAD, that she conceived more than 25 years ago is now a standard and widely used diagnostic.As an "observationalist", Sandra has done a lot of field campaigns, and she talks here with Adam about some of the challenges of these campaigns, the decline of the routine observational network, and the way the prominence of climate "reanalysis" data sets (which are observation-based, but not literally observations) may have contributed to that.Later in the conversation, Adam and Sandra also get into the questions of how to do usable science and contribute to solutions to the climate crisis. Sandra’s view on this is informed by her early experiences doing science in the private sector, including at a defense contracting company before grad school. But more recently, like Adam, she’s been thinking more broadly about how to do science that may have a concrete impact. And that conversation leads them into solar geoengineering, the role of the private sector in climate and weather science, and other topics.I think atmospheric science has done a really good job of explaining and understanding the climate problem, but maybe we're not the solution, maybe the solution is more on the engineering side, and partly, that's just building buildings that are more resilient or moving infrastructure, or figuring out how to do carbon capture in a scalable way, or investing in fusion [...]. Maybe we should just say, "Hey, we've done a really good job explaining the problem, giving you the likely scenarios and the potential timing of those scenarios. But the actual more pragmatic solutions are not what we do."The interview with Sandra Yuter was recorded in February 2022. Image credit: Sandra YuterSandra's website at North Carolina State University

Chris Bretherton gravitated towards math and science as soon as he could read, which was at the tender age of three. His interest was probably the result of both genetics and family upbringing: Chris’ father is Francis Bretherton, a brilliant scientist who made important theoretical advances in fluid dynamics. This gave Chris big advantages, but he also talks about the shadow his dad cast over his career and the need he had to prove himself. "There are actually several other examples within our own field of father-son pairs who were relatively well-known. [...] So it's not actually that uncommon. And I suspect for all of the junior members of those partnerships, there's always been the struggle of, on the one hand, wanting to be different, and on the other hand, being endowed both through genetics, and also through basically family acculturation and upbringing with all the skills to actually be good at the same field." Because of his father’s work, Chris’ family moved from the UK to the US when he was eight years old. Chris’ fascination with math deepened over the years, but he also became interested in how to apply mathematical thinking to physical problems. He discovered the kind of physical problems that he would work on throughout his career when the family relocated to Boulder, Colorado, due to Francis Bretherton's appointment as the director of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). "It really took fire when I was a high school student in Colorado and I joined the Colorado Mountain Club. Because of being a rock climber and a mountaineer as a teenager, I was always very aware of the weather, very concerned about the weather, and experiencing it and its extreme settings, and so it then became rather natural to gravitate towards that later." Chris has worked for his whole career on problems involving moist convection and clouds in the atmosphere, and the roles they play in the larger-scale weather and the climate. He made his name in the field for solving a major and fundamental problem involving shallow convection. In the 90s, using field observations and high-resolution models, Chris and his students figured out how the solid decks of low stratocumulus cloud over the cool subtropical oceans break up into much more scattered and taller cumulus clouds as the trade winds take them over warmer water. Since these low clouds were, and still are, poorly simulated in climate models, and yet they influence the global climate a lot because of the sunlight they reflect, understanding them is really important, and this work was a big breakthrough. Chris has made major advances on a wide range of other problems, including many aspects of deep convection in the tropics, and statistical methods. Recently, Chris left his long-held faculty position at the University of Washington to lead a climate modeling effort at Vulcan, the philanthropic organization of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. His team is using machine learning to make climate models better. It’s a big new direction for Chris and for climate science as a whole, and Adam and Chris get into that in the end of their conversation. The interview with Chris Bretherton was recorded in December 2021. Image credit: University of Washington College of the Environment Chris' website at the University of Washington, and the website of the research team at the Allen Institute for AI, where Chris ist the Senior Director of Climate Modeling

Jane Baldwin has just completed her first year as an Assistant Professor at the University of California Irvine. Her combination of interests is non-traditional, at least for someone coming up through the places and programs that she has. For one thing, Jane does straight up climate dynamics. One of her recent projects, for example, is about how mountains affect various aspects of the tropical climate. But Jane also has a strong interest in how climate affects people, and that leads her in some diverse and interdisciplinary directions. One thread of her research involves extreme heat events, and in that work she’s collaborating with experts in public health to understand the human impacts of those events. In another thread, one that she started during a postdoc in Adam’s group at Columbia University, Jane is looking at tropical cyclone risk. In particular, she is trying to translate tropical cyclone hazard, which means the probabilities of storms with given intensities, into the actual damage those storms would cause. Quantifying climate impacts like this is messy work. It isn’t based on any fundamental physical equations such as those describing the atmosphere or oceans. Often the kind of data or knowledge that would be important to have does not exist. To produce good studies of climate impacts, one needs to collaborate widely, and one needs to know the user and understand what they’re going to do with the results. But this is what it takes to bring knowledge to action, and Jane is serious about doing that. "I had a great time during my PhD, but I think something that weighed on me a little bit is that I felt like there was a bit of a hierarchy in that program [...] The people who do theoretical atmosphere dynamics, that's the peak of the pyramid, [...] and if you're really smart, that's what you should be doing […]. I think I'm still kind of coming to terms with who I am as a scientist and being like, yeah, maybe that's not my jam, but the stuff I'm doing is really cool, and I think as intellectually engaging just in different, maybe slightly different ways." Precisely because this work is so collaborative, interdisciplinary, and focused on objectives that are not purely academic, it’s not entirely obvious that universities know how to reward it. Adam and Jane talk for a while at the end about the potential risks a young academic might be taking by going in this direction. Before Jane became an academic, she had already gathered work experience in a completely different industry, when she interrupted her college education to work for a year as a fashion model. She talks with Adam about what that was like, what she learned during that year, why she did it in the first place and why she later decided to go back to school and become a scientist. The interview with Jane Baldwin was recorded in December 2021. Image credit: Jane Baldwin Jane's website at the University of California Irvine on Twitter: @janebaldwin

On her website, Kate Marvel describes her research like this: “I study climate forcings (things that affect the planet's energy balance) and feedbacks (processes that speed up or slow down warming). Our work here has shown that observational estimates of the Earth's sensitivity to greenhouse gases are probably biased low: assuming climate changes will be small is not a very good idea. We've also shown that human influences are already apparent in global drought patterns, cloud cover, and in the timing and amount of regional rainfall.” You can tell from that summary that Kate, besides being an excellent scientist, is also exceptionally good at communicating her work to the public. Kate has been on tv, on radio, in print, and in countless online fora, talking about the climate problem, as a whole, and many specific aspects of it. Kate translates the science, but more than that, she communicates the emotional reality of being a climate scientist who feels the urgency of global warming, in a way that’s honest and personal. She’s clear, compelling, and funny, and you’ll hear all that in this conversation. You might think that becoming famous for communicating effectively to large, broad audiences would help in one’s scientific career, but that isn’t necessarily the case. While many of her colleagues admire Kate’s public persona, she has the distinct impression that some disapprove, and that that has held her back professionally. Adam and Kate talk at length about that, and about how the bias in academia against popularizers is a special case of a more general problem: Namely, that scientific institutions prioritize research far above all else, and don’t know how to value many other kinds of work that make the institutions themselves better, and that increase the benefits that our research brings to the larger society. Kate came from theoretical physics, with an education in the US and the UK, and a stint in Zimbabwe along the way, before she made it into climate science and then to NASA GISS, down the block from Columbia in New York City. She thinks that the experience of working her way into climate science has sharpened her already existing ability to write and talk clearly, and to not be afraid of asking seemingly simple questions: “I think a lot of it came from very openly being an impostor. Being new to the field, coming into climate science from theoretical physics and not really knowing the jargon. Not really knowing the important questions in the field. […] And that, I think, forces you to be good at eliciting information, and it forces you to be good at communicating. […] And I do think that having no idea what was going on for a really long time and blundering my way around has forced me to get good at figuring out how we talk about what's going on.” The interview with Kate Marvel was recorded in November 2021. Kate's website at Columbia University, and her personal website  Kate giving a TED Talk in 2017, on "Can clouds save us from climate change?" (that's where her picture in this blog post is from) and here she is on Twitter: @DrKateMarvel