Deep Convection

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Episode 6: Chris Bretherton Jun 21, 2022

Show notes

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

Episode 5: Jane Baldwin Jun 07, 2022

Show notes

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

Episode 4: Kate Marvel May 24, 2022

Show notes

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

Episode 3: Kelly Hereid May 10, 2022

Show notes

Kelly Hereid had never heard of reinsurance companies when she got recruited by one while attending a scientific conference. A quick Google search brought some clarification, and in the years since, Kelly has become an expert in the field of catastrophe modeling. This type of modeling was developed mostly in the private sector, driven by the need of reinsurance and insurance companies to quantify the financial risk from natural disasters such as tropical cyclones or earthquakes.

In her current role as head of a research and development team at Liberty Mutual, Kelly needs to understand both the science of natural hazards as well as the business side, and she needs to be able to translate between the scientific community and the business community. Bridging this gap has become even more essential as the reinsurance industry is starting to think about how extreme weather events will impact their bottom lines with global climate change:

“We have an office of sustainability that thinks about transition risk and climate strategy, and how we incorporate this massively changing world of climate risk into our business. And so that’s actually an area that I spend a lot of time in now as well. […] And I talk a lot. Seriously, I do a lot of talks about climate change, catastrophes, and how we can incorporate them into the business. Because I want every single slice of our business to be educated and be able to speak coherently about how climate can affect their business.”

Before the conference that marked the beginning of her career in the private sector, Kelly had done a PhD in paleoclimate, dating dead corals and trying to learn something about the water conditions they had lived in. Coming from a family without any connections to the academic world, going to grad school was not an obvious choice for her at all, even though she had always been interested in science and wanted to become an entomologist as a child (but dropped that plan for fear of getting stung by bees). Luckily though it was obvious for one of her professors:

“So one of my absolute favorite professors came up to me in my senior year […]. And he was like, “Kelly, what are you doing next year?” And I’m like, “Well, I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.” And he’s like, “You are going to grad school.” And he was the kinda person that you just… When they say a statement like that, you just don’t argue with it. So I started going to grad school.”

When you hear Kelly talk, you won’t find it hard to imagine that she can be as convincing and effective in communicating as that professor has been – it’s a rare and much needed superpower for getting science and industry to collaborate.

The interview with Kelly Hereid was recorded in October 2021.

Kelly’s personal website, and here she is on Twitter: @KellyHereid

Episode 2: Ousmane Ndiaye Apr 24, 2022

Show notes

Ousmane Ndiaye’s path to becoming the director of Senegal’s national meteorological service was an unlikely one: Born in Senegal as the youngest of 10 children, he lost his parents at a young age and was raised mostly by one of his sisters. That sister was deeply committed to her little brother’s education, and Ousmane ended up being the first in his family to start high school. But that was just the beginning of an academic career that led him from Senegal to Algeria, and then to the US, where he started a PhD at Columbia University.

At Columbia’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), he worked on developing better ways of predicting the west African monsoon a few months ahead of time. These forecasts are important for farmers, who can use them to inform their decisions on the types of crops they want to plant on their fields.

Equipped with a doctorate, Ousmane decided to go back to Senegal rather than to pursue an academic career in the US – not an easy decision, especially since Ousmane already had a family with four children at the time of his graduation. But he had a strong desire to bring his knowledge back home, and to share it with the communities that could directly benefit from it.

Ousmane understood that the value of the forecasts would be limited not just by how accurate they were, but by whether their potential users understood them and valued them, or not. And he also knew that in order for that to happen you have to understand the users and their needs. So when he got back to Senegal he started holding meetings with farmers, to learn how they think and how they work, and to develop practices of forecasting and forecast communication that would work for them. The meetings served a social purpose – they were a way of gaining the farmers’ trust and respect – as well as an educational one, with Ousmane explaining for example the probabilistic nature of forecasts:

In the training, I was trying to explain to them that maybe sometimes our forecast can be wrong, and we have only probabilistic ways to estimate. We are not 100% sure […], it’s just a likelihood, it’s our best guess. I was […] trying to emphasize [that] again and again. There was an older farmer sitting back, and he just raised his hand while we were explaining, and […] he says: “Don’t worry about it. We know that only God knows 100% what will happen. We know your forecast sometimes will go wrong.”

Ousmane’s work was successful, and in 2019 he became the director of Senegal’s national meteorological service, where he is responsible for everything related to weather and climate, and where he continues to use all his resources – his time, research, knowledge and connections – for the important work he’s doing.

The interview with Ousmane Ndiaye was recorded in September 2021. Image credit: Vanessa Meadu (CCAFS)

Website of Senegal’s national meteorological service, which is part of the country’s National Civil Aviation and Meteorology Agency (ANACIM)

Episode 1: Isaac Held Apr 12, 2022

Show notes

To climate scientists, Isaac Held probably needs no introduction. He is one of the deepest and clearest thinkers in the field, and his insightful research on the dynamics of the Earth’s climate has earned him immense amounts of respect and appreciation.

Isaac spent most of his long and distinguished career until his retirement in 2020 at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, one of the pioneering centers for climate modeling. He was born in 1948 in a refugee camp in Germany, from where his family emigrated to the United States just a few years after. Isaac’s father soon died, and so he and his brother were raised mostly by their mother, who always encouraged the two of them to do well in school – a “job” that Isaac took seriously, and that led him to discover and develop his natural talent for mathematics.

At the University of Minnesota, he became fascinated with theoretical physics as a “wonderful application of mathematics to the real world”, and he went on to go to graduate school in statistical mechanics at Stony Brook in New York. With the Vietnam war raging, however, Isaac started to question the importance of the research he was doing, and he eventually decided to switch to atmospheric and climate science. The rest, as they say, is history: Isaac produced field-changing contributions to topics such as the Hadley circulation, deep convection and tropical meteorology, water vapor and climate feedbacks, and tropical cyclones.

In this episode, Isaac also talks about the importance of good writing in science, and how he has always aimed to explain his scientific research and ideas clearly and concisely. This aspiration becomes evident when reading one of his papers or his blog on climate dynamics (see here for a complete archive of blog posts), which is widely acclaimed both for its thought-provoking content and its lucid style of writing.

His own life story has made Isaac keenly aware of the importance of random events and tipping points, which limit one’s control in ways both liberating and frustrating:

“Something happens and your life goes one way or the other and that happens to all of us in one sense. […] Some of life’s unpredictability can be these huge events affecting large parts of the world, but it could also be these little things in your individual life that make a big difference as well, which are uncontrollable.”

Finally, Adam and Isaac talk about the interaction of science and politics, and about the possible impacts of climate change on human societies, on which Isaac has a slightly more optimistic view than Adam:

“I think I’m a little bit of technological optimist, I don’t know if that’s quite the right word, but I can’t believe that I can visualize what we’ll be capable of in a hundred years, technologically, if I go back a hundred years.”

The interview with Isaac Held was recorded in September 2021. Image credit: NOAA

Isaac’s website at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
His blog on climate dynamics – note that the blog website will disappear soon, but you can find a complete archive here.

Deep Convection Is Back With Season 3! Apr 02, 2022

Show notes

It’s been a while since we released the last episode of Deep Convection, but Season 3 is finally here! We are starting the season with a “prologue episode” featuring Adam and Melanie. Adam asks Melanie how her life has changed since their Deep Convection conversation that was recorded 2.5 years ago (and, spoiler alert, some aspects of it have changed in quite unexpected ways), and Melanie asks Adam how his views about life and the world have changed, and what role the podcast has played for him.

Mostly though, this really is a warm-up for 10 more episodes of Deep Convection, the first one of which (with Isaac Held, one of the deepest and most original thinkers in climate science) will drop in just a bit more than a week!

Episode 10: Shang-Ping Xie Jun 08, 2021

Show notes

When Shang-Ping Xie entered middle school in his home town about 300 miles southwest of Shanghai, China had just come out of the Cultural Revolution, the tumultuous political movement launched by Mao Zedong that had dominated Chinese life for a decade in the 1960s and 70s. That was lucky timing and a big turning point for Shang-Ping: If he had been a few years older, he might have been sent to the countryside after graduating from high school, to work on farms and learn about the rural life. But after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the universities reopened and a merit-based admission system was introduced, which allowed Shang-Ping to go to college to study oceanography (without ever having seen the ocean before!).

From there he went to grad school in Japan, then to the US, then back to Japan for his first faculty position, then back to the US, eventually taking on his current position as a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

Shang-Ping’s research covers a broad range of topics centered around atmosphere-ocean interactions and their role in climate formation, variability, and change. Some highlights of his incredibly prolific scientific career include the work that led to the formulation of the wind-evaporation-sea surface temperature feedback mechanism in the 1990s, and later his contributions to the discovery of the Indian Ocean capacitor effect, and to the development of the “warmer-get-wetter” idea for how rainfall will change with global warming.

The driving force behind Shang-Ping’s impressive scientific output is his deep curiosity and (to quote Richard Feynman) the “pleasure of finding things out”, which have remained unaffected by the “daily grind” of academic life. How he has managed to do that is part of this conversation as well, along with his thoughts on climate change, and how his perception of it has evolved over the years.

“For a period of time I was asking myself what’s beyond what I have done so far. Because at some point, I felt, I know a few things, I just couldn’t see what’s ahead. But I think somehow I was able to overcome this feeling now. Because […] there are still a lot of puzzles. I feel like I know what I want to do for the next few years.”

The interview with Shang-Ping Xie was recorded in March 2021. Image credit: Nelvin C. Cepeda

Shang-Ping’s website at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Episode 9: George Philander May 25, 2021

Show notes

Growing up in South Africa under apartheid, George Philander had to follow a lot of laws that didn’t make sense to him, e.g., that he was not allowed to stand in the line for white people at the post office. When he discovered mathematics and science, he was happy to have found a world that was governed by rational and coherent laws.

“South Africa […] was a strange place because of the apartheid policies. I basically lived in two worlds that didn’t really intersect. The one was the social world, which was subject to these strange laws. And at the same time, I was becoming a scientist, and the world of science seemed an escape from the irrationalities of the apartheid laws.”

George left South Africa in the 1960s to go to graduate school at Harvard, where he decided to move into oceanography. Apart from taking classes and doing research, he also continued to be interested in social concerns, and on weekends he would join people in protesting the war in Vietnam, or even the apartheid in South Africa.

Despite all the differences between the U.S. and South Africa, George also sees some fundamental parallels between these two stages of his life:

“So now I could again do the science and separate the social life [from it]. But the science was much more interesting, and the social life was much more interesting. So it was a somehow idealized version of what I had experienced in South Africa.”

After completing his PhD, George went on to do a postdoc with Jule Charney at MIT, before moving to Princeton where he spent the rest of his career, first at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics lab and then as a professor at Princeton University, from where he retired a few years ago. George is a giant in climate science and has made many important contributions to the field, but he is best known for his key advances in our understanding of the El Niño-southern oscillation phenomenon, or ENSO.

Throughout the years, George has been thinking a lot about how science interacts with the larger world, and he has become convinced that we should not divorce our social concerns from our professional activities. That recognition even led George back to South Africa for a few years in the 2000s, where his goal was to instill an appreciation for nature in young people:

“We’re so focused on the gloom and doom of global warming that we count on fear to persuade people to take care of planet Earth. And I would argue that instead of fear, they should do it out of love for the planet. But you can only love what you know, so they should really know something about the planet before we can expect them to take care of it.”

In this conversation, George also talks about the role of luck in people’s lives and careers, about shortcomings of the educational system, and about living far from home.

The interview with George Philander was recorded in February 2021. Image credit: Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications, Princeton University

George’s website at Princeton University

Episode 8: Suzana Camargo May 11, 2021

Show notes

Suzana Camargo is one of the world’s leading experts on tropical cyclones — a type of storm that includes hurricanes — and their relationship to the climate. When she first started to do research on hurricanes, she thought it was only going to be a one-year project. But life is unpredictable, and so

“[…] and then 20 years later, here I am, still doing hurricanes.”

Suzana’s path to the hurricanes had not been a straight one: She began her academic career in plasma physics, and only moved into atmospheric science after giving up her job as a tenured professor in Brazil and moving to the US, where she took a position as staff associate at the then newly-founded International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University.

This was a big change, and in many ways also a big step down, and it required a lot of work and persistence to firmly establish herself as a leader in the field, and to rise through the ranks to her current position as the first holder of the Marie Tharp Lamont Research Professorship at Columbia University.

“[It] was a big change, […] it was a lot, everything. It was moving countries, two small kids, changing fields. Everything was so overwhelming that I basically was, I felt like I was just going through the motions and trying to survive each day.”

The move from Brazil, where Suzana was born and raised, to the US had not been her first international move: Suzana had done her Ph.D. and postdoc in Germany, where she learned, among other things, that the hardest part in science is often to come up with a good research question, and that the Bavarian dialect sounds very different from the standard German.

Over the last 20 years, Suzana has made important contributions to our understanding of how tropical cyclones are affected by natural climate variations, like El Niño; the influence of human-induced climate change on tropical cyclones, including the evaluation of simulations of tropical cyclones in climate models, and to the practice of seasonal climate forecasting of tropical cyclone activity. At Lamont, she and Adam have offices next door to each other, and the two of them have collaborated on many of these topics.

The interview with Suzana Camargo was recorded in October 2020. Image credit: Suzana Camargo

Suzana’s website at Columbia University

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