Climate Risk Areas Initiative News

In honor of Women's History Month, NOAA is highlighting a few of its female scientists and funded researchers who are making significant strides in the climate sciences and other science fields. The following interview features Dr. Angeline Pendergrass, Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science at Cornell University and Project Scientist I at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). She is a co-lead of the NOAA CMIP6 Task Force, which is funded by the NOAA Climate Program Office’s Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections (MAPP) Program. She focuses on extreme precipitation and its response to climate variability and change.

Occurring frequently over the Southern Plains, droughts are the second most costly U.S. weather and climate disaster. Many efforts have been made to advance drought monitoring, but modeling water variability during drought remains a challenge as numerous physical processes control soil moisture variability.

In honor of Women's History Month, NOAA is highlighting a few of its female scientists and funded researchers who are making significant strides in the climate sciences and other science fields. The following interview is with Dr. Elizabeth Barnes, Associate Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. Her research is funded in part by the NOAA Climate Program Office’s Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections (MAPP) Program. She focuses on climate variability and change, and how data science can help improve our understanding.

Marine heatwaves are increasing, both in the amount of time they last and in their intensity. Because of their potential impacts on fisheries and other marine goods and services, scientists are working to understand and develop practical marine heatwave predictions.

Cloud feedback refers to the response of clouds to surface temperature change. A positive cloud feedback would amplify greenhouse gas-induced warming and have a stronger cooling effect from aerosol‐cloud interactions. Uncertainties in predicting cloud feedbacks are the largest cause of spread in model predictions of future global warming.