Department ofAtmospheric and Climate Science

Professor Shuyi Chen, chair of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), was interviewed by The Seattle Times about the federal government’s plan to dismantle UCAR’s research center. The center, known as the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), has been criticized by federal officials, and they proposed to cut back its operations, including removing key resources like research aircraft and supercomputers. 

Recently, Professor Lynn McMurdie, graduate student Valeria Garcia, and postdoc Troy Zaremba joined the NASA research mission, North American Upstream Feature-Resolving and Tropopause Uncertainty Reconnaissance Experiment (NURTURE), based out of Labrador, Canada. 

Professor Dale Durran is named the 2026 NVIDIA Research Faculty Fellow for his contributions to research collaboration on AI for Earth system prediction!  Prof. Durran has a 25% appointment at NVIDIA as a principal research scientist, with “a research focus on deep learning earth-system modeling for sub-seasonal and seasonal forecasting, forecast ensembles, and generative methods for fine-scale modeling of convective precipitation and other mesoscale fields.”
The above image is Prof. 

“NASA announced on Thursday last week that both the University of Washington STRIVE team and the UW-affiliated EDGE team were selected to lead satellite missions to better understand Earth and improve capabilities to foresee environmental events and mitigate disasters.” The STRIVE (Stratosphere Troposphere Response using Infrared Vertically-resolved light Explorer) mission is led by Professor Lyatt Jaeglé from the Department, and the EDGE (Earth Dynamics Geodetic Explorer) mission is led by Helen Amanda Fricker at the University of California, San Diego. 

“Methane stays in the atmosphere for approximately 10 years before it is removed. Researchers need to know how much methane is removed to gauge what percentage of emissions are accumulating in the atmosphere, but the methane removal process is difficult to measure. 

“In October 2025, after 18 months of detailed atmospheric observations from Australia’s southernmost state, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility wrapped up the Cloud And Precipitation Experiment at kennaook (CAPE-k) in Tasmania. 

Professor Dale Durran was interviewed by New York City’s Channel 5 News about AI weather forecasting. The segment also features Professor Amy McGovern from the University of Oklahoma.
The segment starts at 7:16, watch the interview here. 

New research out today in Nature Communications helps explain recent surges in global warming. The study, led by Knut von Salzen, Professor Sarah Doherty, and Professor Robert Wood, shows that reducing air pollution has inadvertently diminished the brightness of marine clouds, which are key regulators of global temperature. 

Atmospheric and Climate Science alum and University of Wisconsin–Madison Associate Professor Ángel F. Adames Corraliza has been awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “genius grant. Adames Corraliza got his Ph.D. 

Christopher Kenseth, a NSF AGS Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Atmospheric and Climate Science, was selected as the recipient of the 2025 James R. Holton Award by the American Geophysical Union (AGU).