Shortly after Hurricane Otis hit Mexico in late October 2023 after a very rapid (and poorly forecast) intensification, Adam sat down with Frank Marks from NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division (HRD) for the last episode of this season. Frank is one of the central figures in the world of hurricane science. With a career spanning over four decades at th…

Bjorn Stevens’ main scientific interest is in the role of clouds in the climate system. He established himself early in his career as a leader in the study of marine stratus-topped boundary layers. That eventually led him to a broader climate research agenda. And since about 2008, Bjorn heads one of the world’s most prominent climate modeling labs,…

Adam answers listener questions!Kirjoittanut melanie

In this episode we take a break from guest interviews. Instead, Adam explains in detail how the podcast got started, how and why we do it, and who is involved. Just like when you go to any web site or anything and there’s an “About” link, this is that, except via 40 minutes of talking.Kirjoittanut melanie

Arlene Fiore got interested in air pollution first as a kid in the Boston suburbs, partly because she suffered from bad asthma, and that taught her that the air can be harmful. Even though her interest in the Earth’s atmosphere was there from an early age on, the path that led her to her current position as a professor in MIT’s Department of Earth,…

Aglaé Jézéquel’s journey began surrounded by books, in a home where knowledge was cherished. Aglaé shared her parents’ passion from an early age on, but while her family was more into literature, she fell in love with science. Her academic path has led her to her current position as a scientist at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at the Éc…

Sarah Kapnick’s journey in the climate world has not been a conventional one. Starting as a “math nerd in the Midwest”, her path meandered through investment banking, back to academia for a PhD., and now to one of the most influential positions in US climate science and policy – Chief Scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration…

Growing up outside Braunschweig, just on the west side of the border with East Germany during the Cold War, Tapio Schneider spent a lot of his teenage years doing sports, and skiing (often just meters away from the East German border patrol) became a large part of his life. He also had a keen interest in science and a desire to understand the world…

In keeping with this season’s excursions away from Deep Convection’s traditional focus on climate science, this episode features Abhisheik Dhawan. While he’s not a climate scientist, his innovative ideas intersect with climate change, development, and finance in a unique way. He is currently a Sustainable Finance and Partnerships Specialist at the …

Bob Kopp’s academic roots lie in the realms of paleoclimate, paleobiology, and ecology. But, inspired by a legacy of public service passed down from his parents, he soon gravitated towards areas where science meets actionable change. Over the course of his career, he has learned to master the dance of blending use-inspired, policy-oriented research…

In the second episode of this season, we’re branching out from the traditional, science-centered sphere of Deep Convection and into a world captured through the lens of Manila-born photojournalist, Hannah Reyes Morales. Hannah and Adam crossed paths a dinner at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, where they found themselves i…

Rebecca Morss’ scientific credentials are impeccable – a PhD in atmospheric science from MIT, more than 20 years of experience at the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology (MMM) Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and currently the Senior Scientist and Deputy Director of the center. But what really sets Rebecca apart i…

It’s been almost a year since our last episode, and we’re thrilled to announce the arrival of Season 4! In our season opener, Adam and Melanie reconvene, checking in on each other’s lives and exploring some detours—much like in previous seasons, this is the warm-up for 10 more episodes of Deep Convection. Expect an array of diverse guests, each con…

Gabe Vecchi’s research spans a remarkably wide range of topics: he started as an oceanographer, and studied intraseasonal variability in the Pacific, before moving to the Indian Ocean, and then, when he moved to Princeton in the 2000s, to a range of atmospheric problems, including a critically important paper on the influence of global warming on t…

In-Sik Kang’s career in climate science started about half a century ago, and it has been remarkable in many ways—scientifically, but also in that In-Sik has spent most of his life in a country that started from very little, in climate science and every other way, having been devastated by war right at the start of his life. In-Sik is a long-time g…

Born to a space physicist father, Andy Dessler was steeped in science and academia from birth. Unlike other children of successful academics, he never perceived his father’s profession and the implicit expectations put on him as a burden, but soon decided that science was what he wanted to do as well. Andy describes how his career was strongly infl…

Growing up on Long Island, Sandra Yuter loved to go on field trips—she learned about how glaciers had shaped the environment around her and was fascinated by how the resulting landscape still told the history of its geological past. The combination of scientific exploration and imagination that these field trips offered was something Sandra also dr…

Chris Bretherton gravitated towards math and science as soon as he could read, which was at the tender age of three. His interest was probably the result of both genetics and family upbringing: Chris’ father is Francis Bretherton, a brilliant scientist who made important theoretical advances in fluid dynamics. This gave Chris big advantages, but he…

Jane Baldwin has just completed her first year as an Assistant Professor at the University of California Irvine. Her combination of interests is non-traditional, at least for someone coming up through the places and programs that she has. For one thing, Jane does straight up climate dynamics. One of her recent projects, for example, is about how mo…

On her website, Kate Marvel describes her research like this: “I study climate forcings (things that affect the planet’s energy balance) and feedbacks (processes that speed up or slow down warming). Our work here has shown that observational estimates of the Earth’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases are probably biased low: assuming climate changes w…

Kelly Hereid had never heard of reinsurance companies when she got recruited by one while attending a scientific conference. A quick Google search brought some clarification, and in the years since, Kelly has become an expert in the field of catastrophe modeling. This type of modeling was developed mostly in the private sector, driven by the need o…

Ousmane Ndiaye’s path to becoming the director of Senegal’s national meteorological service was an unlikely one: Born in Senegal as the youngest of 10 children, he lost his parents at a young age and was raised mostly by one of his sisters. That sister was deeply committed to her little brother’s education, and Ousmane ended up being the first in h…

To climate scientists, Isaac Held probably needs no introduction. He is one of the deepest and clearest thinkers in the field, and his insightful research on the dynamics of the Earth’s climate has earned him immense amounts of respect and appreciation. Isaac spent most of his long and distinguished career until his retirement in 2020 at the Geophy…

It’s been a while since we released the last episode of Deep Convection, but Season 3 is finally here! We are starting the season with a “prologue episode” featuring Adam and Melanie. Adam asks Melanie how her life has changed since their Deep Convection conversation that was recorded 2.5 years ago (and, spoiler alert, some aspects of it have chang…

When Shang-Ping Xie entered middle school in his home town about 300 miles southwest of Shanghai, China had just come out of the Cultural Revolution, the tumultuous political movement launched by Mao Zedong that had dominated Chinese life for a decade in the 1960s and 70s. That was lucky timing and a big turning point for Shang-Ping: If he had been…

Growing up in South Africa under apartheid, George Philander had to follow a lot of laws that didn’t make sense to him, e.g., that he was not allowed to stand in the line for white people at the post office. When he discovered mathematics and science, he was happy to have found a world that was governed by rational and coherent laws. “South Africa …

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 do…

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 i…

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 move…

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 mar…

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 collec…

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 weat…

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 prop…

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 …

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: Se…

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 …

For Ed Sarachik, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, science and art have always been complementary but equally important ingredients to an intellectually fulfilling life. When he was a physics major at Queens College in New York City, his art teacher gave him an assignment that would become a formative art experience: Spending hour…

Amy Clement, professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, loves the ocean. We are mentioning this because her research may seem to suggest otherwise: Amy has proposed bold and controversial ideas about how the role of the ocean in controlling several modes of variability of the climate system may be sm…

Faye McNeill studies aerosols, small liquid or solid particles floating in the atmosphere. Each cubic centimeter of air contains hundreds or thousands of these particles – some of them are natural (e.g., dust from dry regions or salt from the ocean) and others are released into the air by human activity, e.g., by cars or factories that burn fossil …

This second part of the interview with Mark Cane picks up where Part I left off – at MIT, in the middle of Mark’s PhD. A major focus of the interview is the discovery that made Mark’s career, when he and his student at the time, Steve Zebiak, developed the first dynamical model that could both simulate and predict El Niño events; and then how they …

Mark Cane is the center of the “family portrait” of climate scientists that are featured in this first season of Deep Convection. In recognition of his special role, we are going to cover Mark’s life in two episodes – this is Part I. Mark Cane is most famous for his seminal work on the El Niño/Southern Oscillation phenomenon, which will be one of t…

Richard Seager is a climate scientist at Columbia University and has been an Englishman in New York for more than 30 years. In this conversation, he talks about what will happen to the tropical Pacific under global warming (and why the climate models are wrong about that), about his passion for jazz and how it once led him to bike home at 1 am in t…

Amitav Ghosh’s latest book, “Gun Island”, takes its readers on an adventurous journey from the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans to raging wildfires in Los Angeles and to a Venice that is inexorably sinking into the sea. Amitav is one of the most accomplished writers in either India or the US, the two countries in which he lives. In 2018, he becam…

This is a bonus episode, thrown together quickly, as the coronavirus pandemic is evolving at such a rapid pace that predicting what it will look like in the weeks ahead is incredibly difficult. The guest is Jeff Shaman, one of the world’s experts in modeling the spread of infectious diseases. He is a professor in the Department of Environmental Hea…

Why should we trust science? Historian of science Naomi Oreskes has pondered this question for years, and here she talks about the surprising answer she has come up with (hint: it’s not because of the scientific method). Naomi, a geologist by training, also talks about her time working for a mining company in Australia, the skepticism she faced as …

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Michela Biasutti studies rainfall in the tropics – when and where it rains, and why. She does this at Columbia University in New York, where she settled down after her scientific curiosity had first led her to move from her native Italy to Seattle. Michela is one of many foreign-born scientists who have managed to build successful careers in the Un…