People
Paul Higgins is the director of the American Meteorological Society Policy Program. He studies climate change and its causes, consequences, and potential solutions. He initiated the ClimatePolicy project. From 2005-2006 Paul was a Congressional Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). During his fellowship year, he analyzed climate policy in the office of Senator Mike DeWine. While there he developed provisions to encourage international cooperation and to broadly benefit a wide range of stakeholders. Paul’s scientific research examines the causes and consequences of global climate change. He received Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from Stanford University and was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of California. He is a former fellow of the Department of Energy’s Global Change Education Program.
Richard Rood is a Professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences at the University of Michigan where he teaches atmospheric science and climate dynamics. In 2006 he initiated a cross-discipline course, Climate Change: The Intersection of Science, Economics, and Policy, which has been expanded to address the broader issues of impacts and adaptation. As a member of the Senior Executive Service at NASA, he received recognition for his ability to lead both scientific and high performance computing activities. His scientific background is modeling tracer transport and chemistry in the atmosphere, and more recently, climate modeling. He shares recognition with S. J. Lin for developing the finite-volume dynamical core, the first new dynamical core to achieve wide adoption in atmospheric science in more than 40 years. As Head of the Data Assimilation Office (now GMAO) from 1992-1998, he pioneered the expansion of the scope of data assimilation from numerical weather prediction applications to more generalized Earth science, e.g. climate and chemistry. He is an expert in the quantitative analysis of model simulations with observational information. Currently he writes a regular blog for the Weather Underground.
Richard Rood is a Fellow of American Meteorological Society and a winner of the World Meteorological Organization’s Norbert Gerbier Award. He served on National Research Council’s Board on Competitiveness of U.S. Climate Modeling (2000) and was the lead author High-End Climate Science: Development of Modeling and Related Computing Capabilities, written while detailed to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. His full resume can be found here.