I have always enjoyed math, science, and music. As early as age 7, I wanted to be a scientist, astronaut, or “famous concert pianist.” My reports for school predictably involved severe weather (tornadoes, lightning, and hurricanes). I liked my math and science classes, but wasn’t exactly sure which scientific career route I would pursue. Once in high school, I gradually ruled out Biology and Chemistry, but became enamored by Physics during my junior year. I absolutely loved using math to explain real-world phenomena–what fun!

I started college at The Ohio State University as a physics major with the intent of eventually teaching high school physics (after all, that’s all I’d ever seen of a “real-life” scientist). I didn’t even know that atmospheric scientists existed! I thought all there was to meteorology were the news reporters on television, of which I wanted little part. There were many first-year physics majors when I started, but about half dropped out by our second year. Of those ∼45 remaining, only two of us were female. Even though we had very different personalities, Jill and I became good friends and roommates by our senior year–we had to stick together.  By the time I took quantum mechanics during the fall quarter of my third year, I was becoming pretty disillusioned by the lack of practicality of modern physics. I had learned about an introductory atmospheric science class that would satisfy a degree requirement the previous spring, but I had to wait a year because it was only offered once a year. I took my very first atmospheric science class during the spring of my junior year and fell in love with the subject. At the beginning of the third week of the fall quarter during my fourth year, I was complaining to a friend about my physics classes and how I really loved atmospheric science. This friend suggested changing my major, something that seemed ridiculous at such a late date. I went and spoke to my atmospheric science professor the next day and he eagerly accepted me into his thermodynamics class. I got notes from a friend (it was pretty similar to physics), and was off and running as an atmospheric science major by the end of the week! Because physics and atmospheric science have so much in common, it only delayed my graduation by one quarter.

After college I taught junior- and senior-high mathematics at Mountain Mission School in Grundy, VA, but longed to return to graduate school to continue studying meteorology. I was accepted at Penn State University and the University of Oklahoma and decided to pursue my graduate studies at OU (co-located with the National Severe Storms Laboratory and the Storm Prediction Center). I worked with Dr. Harold Brooks at NSSL and Dr. Jeff Trapp at Purdue for my M.S. degree studying tornadoes from quasi-linear convective systems. For my doctorate, I started out in the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) project under Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier and Dr. Ming Xue. After several years, it became apparent that numerical modeling was not my passion and I began working with Dr. Ken Crawford (director of the Oklahoma Climate Survey), Dr. Mike Richman, and Dr. David Easterling at NCDC (then the National Climate Data Center, now NCEI or National Centers for Environmental Information) on a climatology of extreme precipitation events across the eastern 2/3 of the U.S.

I love studying the weather–it is fascinating, ever-changing, and challenging to predict. I find it beautiful how we can apply our knowledge of mathematics and physical processes to model and predict atmospheric behavior. My graduate work and job at NCDC has been in climatology, even though I never anticipated as an undergraduate student that it could be so interesting! There is still so much to learn about our atmosphere by studying its past behavior. Additionally, I have seen how meteorology and climatology provide many direct societal benefits, which can give great meaning to our work as atmospheric scientists.

My work at what was formerly known as the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC, now NCEI: National Centers for Environmental Information) involved creating the monthly climate reports for the United States. You can view these data here and the tornado climatology page I began here.

In addition to my work being used by scientists, it was exciting to see data that I had processed cited in local and national newspapers (like USA Today), on national news websites, and on local and even cable television news. It is important that we keep track of our climate to monitor both unusual events and long-term trends so we as a society can take preventative actions or adapt to different climate normals.