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

Nadir Jeevanjee is one of those rare people who have both depth and breadth in their skills. He is probably the only person who ever wrote a textbook about tensors and group theory while taking a few years off from grad school to tour with a rock band, and that fact alone should make you want to listen to this interview.

Nadir was born and raised in Los Angeles, and when he was 12 or 13, he got obsessed with music, especially with drumming. Towards the end of high school, he joined The Calling, a rock band that had a huge hit on the radio in the early 2000s. He went to college with the goal of becoming a professional musician, but found himself enjoying physics classes more than music theory, so much so that he embarked on a PhD in physics at UC Berkeley.

About three years into it and struggling with a bit of a “mid-PhD crisis”, Nadir left academia for what turned out to be four years, to tour the country with another band — that’s when he wrote that textbook about tensors. Eventually, though, he finished his PhD and moved into atmospheric science. He is now a Research Physical Scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, where he studies the physics of clouds, radiation, and climate, using a hierarchy of approaches ranging from pencil-and-paper theory to comprehensive computer simulations. His specialty is to condense the complexity of the atmosphere into simple, elegant frameworks that are tractable for human brains.

Nadir is also deeply engaged in the communication of climate science to the wider world and confounded a group called Climate Up Close, which tries to make the essentials of climate science accessible to a broad audience and give people the opportunity to talk directly with climate scientists.

“So I started to give public talks called “Climate Science: How Do We Know What We Know?”, trying to focus on evidence and trying to de-emphasize the consensus on climate change. It’s a very useful fact for people who don’t know it, but for people who do know there’s a consensus but aren’t convinced by that, I think that beating them over the head with it if they’ve already heard it, I think can backfire. And so I wanted to try an approach where I just focused on the evidence. […] And not only try to share a little bit of what we know about climate science, but also get face time.”

The interview with Nadir Jeevanjee was recorded in November 2020. 

Fran Moore, an assistant professor in Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis, works at the intersection of environmental economics and climate science. She studies the impacts of climate change from an economic and societal perspective — how to quantify these impacts, and also how people and communities adapt.

Fran grew up in London, but moved to the US for college, in part because she wanted to do “something a little bit broader” than what continuing her science-focused academic track in the UK would have allowed her to do. This desire to look at things holistically and from an interdisciplinary angle has become a hallmark of her work, in which she uses a variety of statistical methods, economic and climate models. Recently, she has even used Twitter data to understand what type of weather people think of as normal, and how that might be changing.

In this interview, Fran also talks about what is valuable in human society, and how economists try to measure human well-being. And, she and Adam get into a broader conversation about the relation between science and politics, the roles of climate scientists and academics generally in the public sphere, and whether by doing research climate scientists are really helping anyone or not.

“That was part of my motivation to move more into the social sciences. Because my view was, I think, recognizing that the big questions we need to motivate action on climate change, on the science side, have largely been answered. At least on the mitigation side. But there are still big questions, right?”

The interview with Fran Moore was recorded in September 2020. Photo credit: UC Davis

Before Marshall Shepherd was bitten by the weather bug, he wanted to be an entomologist. But as luck would have it (at least for the fields of weather and climate science), Marshall changed his sixth-grade science project from honey bees to weather prediction after he had found out that he was highly allergic to bee stings. That science project marked the beginning of Marshall’s passion for weather, which has led him to become professor of geography and atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia.

“I’ve actually been working or pushing really hard to try to advocate that engagement and service becomes more of a part of that sort of calculus for things like promotions and tenure because I don’t view it as something extra when I do these things. I view it […] as a synthesis of a broader mission that we have.”

The interview with Marshall Shepherd was recorded in August 2020. Photo credit: Nancy Evelyn

On August 29, 2005, Deanna Hence was aboard a research airplane flying through Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane heading for New Orleans. Thinking back to that day, Deanna remembers feeling both elated and deeply worried at the same time — the scientist in her was excited about the extraordinary data the instruments on the plane were collecting, but she was also aware that the storm’s impact on New Orleans would be devastating. This experience made her realize at a visceral level that science alone is not always enough:

“And so it was that campaign which also made me realize something extremely important, that the best science is not of much use unless it gets to where it needs to go and comes in a form that it can actually be used. And so that’s when I started really thinking  about the interface of science communication, policy, emergency management, all these different factors. […] We as atmospheric scientists form one key component to that, but there’s this whole larger framework that the information that we produce has to fit into in a way that’s going to be usable by all those different stakeholders, so that they can work to, in this case, save lives.”

An Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Deanna studies tropical cyclones, particularly the structure of their rainbands. Her interests also include orographic rain in midlatitudes, and other aspects of cloud and precipitation physics. Growing up in the tornado-prone Dallas area, she became fascinated with extreme weather events at an early age, and got drawn into atmospheric science for real when she realized how much she enjoys participating in field campaigns like the one that gave her a close-up view of Hurricane Katrina.

Deanna has also made questions of diversity, equity and inclusion in the Earth sciences a primary focus of her work — an unusual commitment for a young faculty member working under the pressures of “publish or perish”, and in this interview she talks about that decision and its implications.

The interview with Deanna Hence was recorded in August 2020. 

Brian Mapes fell in love with cumulus clouds when he was looking out an airplane window during his first flight, on the way to Iowa to toil in the fields with his uncle. He was struck by their beauty, but also wanted to understand them scientifically. 

In particular, Brian got interested in how clouds, which are relatively small, are related to weather systems that are much larger, and which is controlling which, how and to what degree. He took issue with the (then-)predominant idea in the field that turbulent convection and clouds are merely a passive response to the large-scale forcing.

“They’re just chiseled from marble, these Midwestern summer clouds. It’s like landscapes, you could imagine romping and playing on them. Except they change every three minutes… It’s like a time evolving landscape. I was just in love with it. And I felt that it had a great amount of life force or something. […] Vigor, agency, life force. I felt like it was a thing that had some heart to it. And then you come, and so you go into that field of science and you come along and you discover the people running the show have decided that it’s a too-complicated-to-care-about response to some forcing. And it drove me batty.”

Before becoming an atmospheric scientist, Brian studied chemistry at Caltech and spent his free time experimenting with explosives of all kind in the Mojave Desert. But he eventually decided to look for a less hazardous field and discovered his fascination with the atmosphere after moving back to his home state of Colorado.

Over the course of his career, which has led him to become professor at the University of Miami, Brian has worked on a lot of different topics, but to him they are all manifestations of the one problem that interests him most, which is the problem of scale.

“[…] it was just echoes and echoes of a philosophical question which is, what’s the relationship between the individual and the collective? That’s the one thing that interests me, and I play it out over here in meteorology, and I’m also fascinated with the social sciences and ecology and stuff, where… It’s everywhere!”

In this interview, you will also hear Brian talk about language and poetry in science, improv, and the role of the appendix in “body politics.”

The interview with Brian Mapes was recorded in January 2020. 

Vishal Vasan, an applied mathematician at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bangalore, India, thinks of himself as a “mathematical salesman”, who uses his mathematical tools and expertise to help potential collaborators in other fields. Vishal’s particular interest are problems involving partial differential equations,
their properties and behavior, and methods for solving them, whether on paper or on the computer.

“This is at least my personal view of applied math. It’s a service. I help other people. I helped people with their homework problems when I was a kid. And I help my colleagues with their math problems now. And if that’s what this leads to, helping other people with their problems, then sure. If I can help I’ll help.”

His eagerness to apply mathematics to real-world problems has led Vishal to work on a wide range of topics: condensed matter physics, optics, water waves  –
especially, tsunamis – and recently also the Indian monsoon. Apart from solving mathematical and scientific problems, Vishal also likes to think and talk about political and societal issues, particularly those that concern his home country:

“I think a lot of India’s problems are not sexy. Which is we don’t require grand solutions. We require things that most of the world has figured out. Toilets. Sewage treatment plants. Garbage disposal plants. I don’t think our problems for now are sexy.”

Having moved back and forth between India, the UK, and the US, Vishal is a perfect example of the internationality of science. Given his own global life trajectory, he is deeply interested in the question of how to form an identity and a sense of belonging in the midst of a tsunami of cultural influences, and in this interview he talks about that as well.

The interview with Vishal Vasan was recorded in December 2019. Image credit: ICTS

Sulochana Gadgil has had a life-long fascination with the Asian monsoon, the seasonally shifting wind pattern driving the rain storms which are the lifeblood of India’s agricultural economy. Born in Pune, she studied mathematics in India and the USA – at Harvard and MIT – before returning to India, where she was a professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore from 1973 until her retirement a few years ago. 

Sulochana is one of the world’s leading experts on the monsoon, and she has made enormous contributions to its understanding. She has never shied away from questioning the prevailing theories, and she was the first one to demonstrate that, contrary to the explanation still found in many textbook, the monsoon is not a gigantic land-sea breeze. Instead, it is a manifestation of the “intertropical convergence zone”, a migrating planetary-scale system of tropical rain belts. Sulochana has also worked with economists and mathematicians (including her son) to quantify the impact of year-to-year monsoon variations on the Indian economy. They showed that even though the contribution of agriculture to India’s economy has diminished over the last five decades, the impact of droughts on the GDP has remained large (2 to 5%) throughout. 

Apart from her research, Sulochana also talks about growing up as a scientifically-minded girl in Pune, about the Western-centric lens in science and the thinking about environmental problems, and about the challenges of interdisciplinary collaborations.

“But I found to my dismay that agricultural scientists were least interested. Although when you talk to farmers, what is the most important factor impacting your yields, they will say climate. But agricultural scientists since the Green Revolution can only think of different varieties and pesticides and fertilizers.”

The interview with Sulochana Gadgil was recorded in December 2019. Image credit: Adam Sobel

Deep Convection is back with a new season! Starting next Tuesday, February 2nd, we will release a new episode every other week.

In this prologue to Season 2, which was recorded two weeks ago, Melanie asks Adam about his experience making Deep Convection; they look back at the past season and ahead to the upcoming new season. We’ll say this much: Season 2 starts in India, and it features 10 wonderful guests who share stories from their lives in and outside of science. Stay tuned!

Make sure to hit the subscribe button to get all future episodes. You can also find all episodes of Season 1 in the episode archive on this website.

Melanie Bieli is a special guest in more than one way. She’s the first junior scientist to appear on Deep Convection, having just finished her Ph.D. a year ago; but more importantly, she’s the co-creator and creative director of the podcast. So she has been part of all the previous episodes, silently — but on this episode you can actually hear her voice.

Melanie was born and raised in Switzerland. She did her MS degree at ETH Zurich, in Atmospheric Science, and then spent a couple of years working in the reinsurance industry, at Swiss Re in Zurich, studying extreme weather risk. That was a good job, and could easily have led to a permanent career and nice life in her home country. But Melanie didn’t feel challenged enough by that life, so she left to do a Ph.D. in Applied Math at Columbia.

“Whenever I get too comfortable, I make decisions that get me out of my comfort zone.”

Melanie wrote her doctoral thesis on the extratropical transition of tropical cyclones, and is now a postdoc at Caltech working with Tapio Schneider’s CliMA project to design a new climate model. She’s thinking about her next steps. They may or may not be in academia.

You can see all your peers starting their post doc positions and […] my natural reaction to that is, let me not go with the flow.

Melanie and Adam recorded this episode in Costa Rica, while there for the NSF OTREC field campaign, just a few days after Melanie’s thesis defense. Besides her life and career to date, they talk about religion and spirituality, the merits of academic vs. private sector jobs, and how to maximize one’s positive impact on the world.

“Most people want to have, want to feel like they’re having an impact…they want something that’s emotionally satisfying and not necessarily… if you actually evaluate what your contribution is to the world, that would actually look good in that evaluation.”

The interview with Melanie Bieli was recorded in August 2019.