Deep Convection

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Episode 5: Tapio Schneider Sep 25, 2023

Show notes

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)

Episode 4: Abhisheik Dhawan Sep 11, 2023

Show notes

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

Episode 3: Bob Kopp Aug 28, 2023

Show notes

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

Episode 2: Hannah Reyes Morales Aug 14, 2023

Show notes

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.

Episode 1: Rebecca Morss Aug 01, 2023

Show notes

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

Welcome to the beginning: Season 4 of Deep Convection is launching soon! Jul 21, 2023

Show notes

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

Episode 10: Gabe Vecchi Aug 16, 2022

Show notes

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, Gabe is also an open book, full of ideas, and you’ll get that clearly from this conversation.

The interview with Gabe was recorded in May 2022. Image credit: Denise Applewhite, Princeton University Office of Communications

Gabe’s website at Princeton University

Episode 9: In-Sik Kang Aug 02, 2022

Show notes

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

Episode 8: Andy Dessler Jul 19, 2022

Show notes

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

Episode 7: Sandra Yuter Jul 05, 2022

Show notes

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 Yuter

Sandra’s website at North Carolina State University

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