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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2005. Review of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's Synthesis and Assessment Product on Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11285.
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C
Committee and Staff Biographies

William J. Randel (Chair), is a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. His research interests include dynamic variability and climatology of the stratosphere and the observed variability of trace constituents in the middle atmosphere using satellite observations. He has contributed to the WMO/UNEP (World Meteorological Organization/United Nations Environment Programme) Assessments of ozone and temperature trends in the stratosphere and is actively involved with a number of SPARC (Stratospheric Processes and their Role in Climate) activities. He is a lead author on the recently completed IPCC Special Report on Safeguarding the Ozone Layer and the Global Climate System, and a member of the scientific steering group for the Network for the Detection of Stratospheric Change (NDSC). He has also served as chair of the American Geophysical Union’s Committee on Atmospheric Dynamics and the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on the Middle Atmosphere and is a member of the NRC’s Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate. Dr. Randel received his Ph.D. in physics from Iowa State University.

Judith A. Curry is Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include remote sensing, climate of the polar regions, atmospheric modeling, and air/sea interactions. She participates in the World Meteorological Organization’s World Climate Research Program, was a member of the Science Steering Group of the Arctic Climate System (ACSYS) Program, and chairs the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) Cloud System Studies Working Group on Polar Clouds. She co-chaired the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean (SHEBA) program’s Science Working Group. Dr. Curry previously served on two NRC Committees: the Polar Research Board’s Committee to Review NASA’s Polar Geophysical Data Sets and the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate’s Panel on Coastal Meteorology. She holds a Ph.D. in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago. She is currently a member of the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate’s Climate Research Committee.

Dennis L. Hartmann is a professor and chair of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington. His research includes low-frequency variability in the atmosphere and climate system and research climate change. His

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2005. Review of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's Synthesis and Assessment Product on Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11285.
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climate research focuses on the interaction of dynamics, radiation, and cloud processes, and their roles in determining the sensitivity of the global climate to forcings such as increasing carbon dioxide or aerosol burden. Recent work has resulted in a “Fixed Anvil Temperature” or FAT Hypothesis, that indicates that on the basis of fundamental physical processes the temperature at the tops of tropical anvil clouds should remain about the same during climate change. In the area of dynamics, he is currently interested in the atmospheric dynamical processes that give rise to intrinsic low-frequency variability, especially the interaction of transient and stationary waves with zonal jets in middle latitudes. Dr. Hartmann was a member of the NRC’s Climate Research Committee and Chair of the Panel on Climate Change Feedbacks. He received his Ph.D. in geophysical fluid dynamics from Princeton University.

Phil Jones is the Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Dr. Jones completed a B.A. in Environmental Sciences at the University of Lancaster and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. at the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His research has focused in instrumental climate change, paleoclimatology, detection of climate change and the extension of riverflow records in the United Kingdom using long rainfall records. Dr. Jones is recognized for the time series of hemispheric and global surface temperatures, which he updates on a monthly basis. He has coedited four books: Climate Since A.D. 1500 (with Ray Bradley); Climatic Variations and Forcing Mechanisms of the Last 2000 Years (with Ray Bradley and Jean Jouzel); History and Climate: Memories of the Future (with Astrid Ogilvie, Trevor Davies and Keith Briffa) and Improved Understanding of Past Climatic Variability from Early European Instrumental Sources (with Dario Camuffo). Dr. Jones has been a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society since 1992 and was on the Editorial Committee of the International Journal of Climatology until 1995. Currently, he is on the editorial board of Climatic Change, an elected member of Academia Europaea since 1998 and a member of the American Meteorological Society since 2001. He was jointly awarded the Hugh Robert Mill Medal in 1995 by the Royal Meteorological Society for work on U.K. rainfall variability, and in 1997 the Outstanding Scientific Paper Award by the Environmental Research Laboratories/NOAA for being a coauthor on the paper “A search for Human Influences on the Thermal Structure of the Atmosphere,” by Ben Santer et al. in Nature, 382, 39-46 (1996). Most recently Dr. Jones was awarded the first Hans Oesschger Medal from the European Geophysical Society (now the European Geosciences Union) in 2002 and the International Journal of Climatology prize of the Royal Meteorological Society for papers published in the last five years, also in 2002.

Kenneth Kunkel is Head of the Atmospheric Environment Section at the Illinois State Water Survey. He has also served as Director of the Midwestern Regional Climate Center and Director of the Office of Applied Climatology. Dr. Kunkel’s research interests include climate variability and change, climate extremes, and boundary layer meteorology. He has considerable experience working with U.S. surface climate datasets and has published a number of papers on analysis of such datasets. In addition, Dr. Kunkel has knowledge of the limitations and proper use of surface temperature data.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2005. Review of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's Synthesis and Assessment Product on Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11285.
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Richard S. Lindzen is Sloan Professor of Meteorology in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Lindzen is a dynamical meteorologist with interests in the broad topics of climate, planetary waves, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, and hydrodynamic instability. His research involves studies of the role of the tropics in mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity. He has made major contributions to the development of the current theory for the Hadley Circulation, which dominates the atmospheric transport of heat and momentum from the tropics to higher latitudes, and has advanced the understanding of the role of small scale gravity waves in producing the reversal of global temperature gradients at the mesopause. He pioneered the study of how ozone photochemistry, radiative transfer and dynamics interact with each other. He is currently studying the ways in which unstable eddies determine the pole to equator temperature difference, and the nonlinear equilibration of baroclinic instability and the contribution of such instabilities to global heat transport. He has also been developing a new approach to air-sea interaction in the tropics, and is actively involved in parameterizing the role of cumulus convection in heating and drying the atmosphere. He has developed models for the Earth’s climate with specific concern for the stability of the ice caps, the sensitivity to increases in CO2, the origin of the 100,000 year cycle in glaciation, and the maintenance of regional variations in climate. In cooperation with colleagues and students, he is developing a sophisticated, but computationally simple, climate model to test whether the proper treatment of cumulus convection will significantly reduce climate sensitivity to the increase of greenhouse gases. Professor Lindzen is a recipient of the AMS’s Meisinger and Charney Awards, and the AGU’s Macelwane Medal. He is a consultant to the Global Modeling and Simulation Group at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Dr. Lindzen is a member of the National Academy of Science.

Richard L. Smith is a Professor of Statistics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dr. Smith received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1979 and has previously held academic positions at Imperial College (London), the University of Surrey (Guildford, England) and Cambridge University. His principal areas of research are spatial statistics, time series analysis, extreme value theory, and Bayesian statistics. Specific areas of expertise include spatial and time series modeling of environmental pollutants, the health effects of atmospheric pollution, the statistics of global climate change, and extreme values in insurance and finance. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, and has won the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society, and the Distinguished Achievement Medal of the Section on Statistics and the Environment, American Statistical Association. In 2004 he was the J. Stuart Hunter Lecturer of The International Environmetrics Society (TIES). He is also a Chartered Statistician of the Royal Statistical Society. Dr. Smith is a statistician with a particular interest in climatology and environmental change with published papers in both

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2005. Review of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's Synthesis and Assessment Product on Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11285.
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statistics and climatology journals on testing the significance of climate trends and their relation to climate models.

John Michael Wallace is a Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington. Dr. Wallace’s research has been directed at improving understanding of global climate and its year-to-year and decade-to-decade variations, making use of observational data. He has contributed to the identification and understanding of a number of atmospheric phenomena, including the vertically propagating planetary waves that drive the quasi-biennial oscillation in zonal winds in the equatorial stratosphere, the 4-5-day period easterly waves that modulate daily rainfall over the tropical oceans, and the dominant spatial patterns in month-to-month and year-to-year climate variability, including the one through which the El Niño phenomenon in the tropical Pacific influences climate over North America. He has also contributed to the methodology for isolating systematic space-time patterns in noisy geophysical data. Presently, Dr. Wallace is attempting to assess the extent to which human activities are contributing to recent climatic trends such as the pronounced wintertime warming over Russia and Alaska. In 2000, he chaired the NRC Panel on Reconciling Temperature Observations. Dr. Wallace is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Junhong Wang is a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Dr. Wang earned her Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from Columbia University. Her expertise on climate observations and measurement, especially related to radiosonde observations, and on weather and climate variability is particularly relevant to this study. Dr. Wang has used global radiosonde data to study cloud vertical structure and has been working on understanding and improving radiosonde humidity measurements. Currently, she is continuing her work towards developing future reference radiosondes for global climate observations.

STAFF

Chris Elfring is director of the Polar Research Board (PRB) and the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (BASC). She is responsible for all aspects of strategic planning, project development and oversight, financial management, and personnel for both units. Since joining the PRB in 1996, Ms. Elfring has overseen or directed studies that produced the following reports: Frontiers in Polar Biology in the Genomics Era (2003), Cumulative Environmental Impacts of Oil and Gas Activities on Alaska’s North Slope (2003), A Century of Ecosystem Science: Planning Long-term Research in the Gulf of Alaska (2002), and Enhancing NASA’s Contributions to Polar Science (2001). In addition, she is responsible for the Board’s activities as the U.S. National Committee to the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

Parikhit Sinha was a Program Officer for the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (BASC) until April 2005. He received a B.A. in environmental engineering sciences from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from the University of Washington, Seattle. His doctorate research involved airborne

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2005. Review of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's Synthesis and Assessment Product on Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11285.
×

measurements and chemical transport modeling of trace gas and particle emissions from savanna fires in southern Africa. Since joining the National Academies in 2004, he has worked on studies addressing radiative forcing of climate change, rapid climate variability and change in Asia, and climate change indicators in the United States.

Rachael Shiflett is a senior program assistant with the Polar Research Board. She received her M.Sc. in environmental law from Vermont Law School in 2001 and will complete her J.D. at Catholic University in May 2007. Ms. Shiflett has coordinated National Research Council studies that produced the reports: A Vision for the International Polar Year 2007-2008 (2004), and International Polar Year 2007-2008 Report of the Implementation Workshop (2004).

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2005. Review of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's Synthesis and Assessment Product on Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11285.
×

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2005. Review of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's Synthesis and Assessment Product on Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11285.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2005. Review of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's Synthesis and Assessment Product on Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11285.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2005. Review of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's Synthesis and Assessment Product on Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11285.
×
Page 59
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2005. Review of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's Synthesis and Assessment Product on Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11285.
×
Page 60
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2005. Review of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's Synthesis and Assessment Product on Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11285.
×
Page 61
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2005. Review of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's Synthesis and Assessment Product on Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11285.
×
Page 62
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The U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), established in 2002 to coordinate climate and global change research conducted in the United States and to support decision-making on climate-related issues, is producing twenty-one synthesis and assessment reports that address its research, observation, and decision-support needs. The first report, produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in coordination with other agencies, focuses on understanding reported differences between independently produced data sets of temperature trends for the surface through the lower stratosphere and comparing these data sets to model simulations. To ensure credibility and quality, NOAA asked the National Research Council to conduct an independent review of the report. The committee concluded that the report Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Understanding and Reconciling Differences is a good first draft that covers an appropriate range of issues, but that it could be strengthened in a number of ways.

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