April 2015 Dry Times interactive

NIDIS: WHO WE ARE3for South Dakota. He has a background in climatology,meteorology and agricultural meteorology. He has been atSDSU since 2003.Art DeGaetanoArt DeGaetano is professor in theDepartment of Earth and AtmosphericSciences at Cornell. He is also the directorof the federally-supported NortheastRegional Climate Center (NRCC). TheNRCC’s mission is to enhance the useand dissemination of climate informationto a wide variety of sectors in the Northeast. Art serves asa climate specialty editor for the Bulletin of the AmericanMeteorological Society.Art has been at Cornell since 1991 serving as thecenter’s research climatologist until 2001. He receivedan interdisciplinary Ph.D. focusing on climatology andhorticulture from Rutgers University.Hailan WangHailan Wang is currently a seniorresearch scientist at Science Systems andApplications, Inc., affiliated with bothNASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC)Global Modeling and Assimilation Office(GMAO) and NASA Langley ResearchCenter. She holds a B.S. in Meteorologyfrom Ocean University of China, and a Ph.D. in AtmosphericSciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Wang’s research interests include climatevariability and predictability, droughts, weather and climateextremes, global energy cycle, and GCM modeling of theEarth’s climate. She has been involved in a number of NOAAand NASA research projects investigating North Americandrought drivers and physical mechanisms. Currently, asthe PI of two NOAA projects, she is leading efforts at NASAGMAO of investigating the role of stationary Rossby wavesfor subseasonal development of North American droughts,as well as improving NASA GEOS-5 AGCM simulations ofMadden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) using Dynamics of MJO(DYNAMO) field observations.INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH ANDAPPLICATIONSMark ShaferMark Shafer is Associate StateClimatologist at the OklahomaClimatological Survey, and establishedand leads the Southern Climate ImpactsPlanning Program (SCIPP), a NOAARegional Integrated Sciences andAssessments (RISA) program based atthe University of Oklahoma and Louisiana State University.SCIPP focuses on place-based applications of climate andweather information to improve community preparednessfor a range of natural hazards, including drought. Hisresearch interests focus upon communication between thescientific community and policy makers, particularly inmanaging societal response to extreme events and climatechange. Mark holds an M.S. in meteorology and a Ph.D. inpolitical science from the University of Oklahoma and was acoordinating lead author on the Great Plains chapter in the2014 National Climate Assessment.Matt RollinsMatt Rollins is the national programleader for U.S. Forest Service Wildland Fireand Fuels Research and Development inWashington D.C. In 2000 he got his start asa research ecologist with the Forest Serviceat the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory,working on evaluating how changes inwildland fire management strategies affected landscapecomposition, structure, and function over the 20th century;forecasting fire regimes and landscape change under achanging climate using ecological simulation models; andintegrating landscape modeling and satellite imagery fornational fire regime and fuel mapping applications. From2009 to 2014 he worked with the USGS at the EROS datacenter as fire science team leader and at USGS headquartersas their National Wildland Fire Science Coordinator.He earned a B.S. in Wildlife Biology in 1993 and an M.S. inForestry in 1995 from the University of Montana in Missoula,Mont. His Ph.D. is from the University of Arizona in 2000,where he worked at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.ENGAGING PREPAREDNESS COMMUNITIESDeborah BathkeDr. Deborah Bathke is a climatologistwith drought management experience,working with the National DroughtMitigation Center and the University ofNebraska-Lincoln’s School of NaturalResources and Department of Earth &Atmospheric Sciences.She was the assistant state climatologist in New Mexico,where she chaired the state’s Drought Monitoring WorkingGroup. She represented New Mexico in the ClimateAssessment for the Southwest program (CLIMAS), one ofNOAA’s RISA programs. Among the projects she collaboratedon were adapting the dynamic drought index for basins in theCarolinas to the Southwest; implementing a western versionof the AgClimate tools developed by the Southeast ClimateConsortium; and convening technical workshops on tree-ringreconstructions of streamflow. Bathke supervises ongoingstudent research on urban landscaping and drought.She earned her B.S. and M.S. from the University ofNebraska-Lincoln, and her Ph.D. in atmospheric sciencesfrom the Ohio State University.Beth FreemanBeth A. Freeman is the regionaladministrator for FEMA Region VII. Shealso served FEMA in the past as thedirector for Region VII in 2000. She gainedcontinued on next page