Appendix E
Biographical Sketches of Planning Committee Members
Dr. David A. Robinson
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Dr. David A. Robinson is a Professor at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He has expertise in the collection and archiving of accurate climatic data and is interested in climate change (particularly state and regional climate issues), hemispheric and regional snow cover dynamics, interactions of snow cover with other climate elements, and the dynamics of solar and terrestrial radiative fluxes at and close to the surface of the earth. Dr. Robinson is the author or co-author of approximately 130 articles, more than half in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters. He also is the State Climatologist for New Jersey. Dr. Robinson has served on several NRC committees and as the chairman of the Committee on Climate Data Records from Operational Satellites: Development of a NOAA Satellite Data Utilization Plan. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Dr. Uma Bhatt
University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Dr. Uma Bhatt is an Associate Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Her research interests include role of sea ice, oceans, and land in climate variability, and change; multi-decadal climate variability; climate in Alaska; and complex systems research. She received her Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from the University of Wisconsin—Madison in 1996.
Dr. Cecilia Bitz
University of Washington
Dr. Cecilia Bitz is an Associate Professor in the Atmospheric Sciences Department at the University of Washington. Her research interests include climate dynamics, climate change, paleoclimate, the role of sea ice in the climate system, Arctic/North Atlantic interactions, and sea ice model development. The primary tools for her research are a variety of models, from simple reduced models to sophisticated climate system models. Dr. Bitz is a member of the Advisory Board for the Community Climate System Model sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy and the steering committee for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Program. She received her Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from the University of Washington in 1997.
Dr. David H. Bromwich
The Ohio State University
Dr. David H. Bromwich is a Senior Research Scientist and Director of the Polar Meteorology Group at the Byrd Polar Research Center of The Ohio State University. He is also a Professor with the Atmospheric Sciences Program of the Department of Geography. Dr. Bromwich’s research interests include the climatic impacts of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets; coupled mesoscale-global circulation model simulations; the atmospheric moisture budget of high southern latitudes, Greenland, and the Arctic basin using numerical analyses; and the influence of tropical ocean-atmosphere variability on the polar regions. Dr. Bromwich has served on the National Research Council’s Committee on Geophysical and Environmental Data and was previously a U.S. Representative of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. He is a member of the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, the Royal Meteorological Society, and the American Association of Geographers. Dr. Bromwich earned his Ph.D. in meteorology from the University of Wisconsin—Madison in 1979.
Dr. Lance F. Bosart
State University of New York, Albany
Dr. Lance F. Bosart is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the State University of New York, Albany. He joined the University at Albany faculty after he received his Ph.D. in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969. He was promoted to full Professor in 1983 and Distinguished Professor in 2004. His research specialty is synoptic-dynamic meteorology. Dr. Bosart works on a variety of observationally driven large-scale, synoptic-scale, and mesoscale basic research problems that focus on gaining a better understanding of the behavior of tropical, mid-latitude, and polar weather systems.
Dr. Clara Deser
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Dr. Clara Deser is a Senior Scientist and Head of the Climate Analysis Section in the Climate and Global Dynamics Division at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Her research interests include diagnostic analysis of observed and modeled global climate variability in the coupled atmosphere-ocean-ice-land system on diurnal to centennial time scales. Dr. Deser has worked in the field of climate variability throughout her career. Recent scientific activities have focused on the causes and consequences of Arctic sea ice loss, uncertainty in climate change projections, the El Niño Southern Oscillation phenomenon, the North Atlantic Oscillation, and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. She received her Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from the University of Washington in 1989.
Dr. Walter Meier
NASA
Dr. Walter Meier is a Research Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He was formerly a Research Scientist for the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is an expert on sea ice remote sensing and data assimilation and Arctic climate and climate change. His areas of observational expertise include SSM/I passive microwave polar stereographic sea ice products; visible
and infrared products; and field observations. Dr. Meier is currently focused on better understanding the decreasing Arctic summer sea ice cover and its impacts. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1998.