Science Alliance

Dr. McKenzie Skiles first became interested in snow and climate change growing up in Anchorage, Alaska, and found that pursuing snow hydrology was the perfect way to combine her love of snow and mountains with her interest in earth science and climate change. She is an Assistant Professor in the Geography Department at the University of Utah, where she directs the Laboratory for Snow Hydrology from Research to Operations (Snow HydRO Lab). She has undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Utah, and a PhD from UCLA.

Her research is interdisciplinary and aims to contribute to our understanding of how much water is held in the mountain snowpack, when and how fast it will melt, and how that is changing over time using a combination of field observations, remote sensing, lab analysis, and numerical modeling. One of her main research trajectories is investigating the impacts of aerosol deposition on snow. She has published widely on this topic, including an invited review on the topic for Nature Climate Change. She was also a contributing author to the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

McKenzie believes in the importance of effective science communication and outreach and advocating for science informed policy. She has visited Washington DC to speak with law makers on multiple occasions. She is also an ambassador for the citizen science Community Snow Observations project, Vice President of the International Commission on Snow and Ice Hydrology, Incoming President of the Snow International Working Group (SINTER), and serves on the American Geophysical Union Cryosphere Focus Group Executive Committee.

David Hill is a professor at Oregon State University and a National Geographic Explorer. He has degrees in aerospace engineering (UIUC) and civil and environmental engineering (UC Berkeley). For over 25 years, he has studied how water behaves from snowy mountain headwaters to the coast. He collaborates with other scientists interested in water’s response to climate drivers and works with stakeholders to provide information on water resources. Hill is one of the founders of the Community Snow Observations project, which teams up with backcountry enthusiasts and professionals to improve models of snow distribution in mountain environments. Hill has also twice been an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. No matter the hemisphere, if it is springtime, you’ll find him out on skis sampling the snow between mountain summit and trailhead.

Charles Post is a Montana based ecologist, creative and ecological brand consultant, co-founder of The Nature Project (501c3) and a National Fellow at The Explorers Club. His academic and field experience stemmed from a baccalaureate and graduate school career at U.C. Berkeley while mentored by evolutionary ecologist, Dr. Stephanie Carlson, and later by the esteemed food web ecologist, Dr. Mary Power. Charles has participated in research projects spanning a diversity of vertebrate and invertebrate groups across North America from songbirds and salmonids to mayflies and stream dwelling amphibians. After completing his graduate work on the ecology of the American dipper (Cinclus mexicanus), Charles focused on developing connections between science, ecology and the general public. Through creative outlets like film and writing, and consulting positions in the outdoor and technology space, Charles continues to pursue opportunities with the potential to help save our home planet.

Dr. Seth Campbell is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maine, an intermittent Research Geophysicist for the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research & Engineering Laboratory, and the Director of Academics & Research for the Juneau Icefield Research Program (JIRP). JIRP is the longest operating polar research and educational program in North America. Over the past fifteen years, Seth has conducted glaciology, permafrost, climate, near-surface geology, and geomorphology research using a range of in situ, remote sensing, and numerical modeling methods. Seth has participated in over 50 field expeditions for research in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, South America, Antarctica, and the contiguous United States. His current research focuses on quantifying changes occurring to the cryosphere and the impacts of these changes on the planet. Additionally, through his affiliations, Seth works to promote a collaborative, international, and inclusive Earth science community, one that can more effectively tackle global environmental challenges we face. Seth generally spends his free time paddling and fly fishing or in the mountains, skiing and climbing rock or ice.

As a Climate Data Scientist at Rhodium Group in Oakland, CA, Ian builds tools to understand and communicate extreme event risks in a changing climate. His work blends earth system modeling with economics to understand how changing extremes will impact communities around the country and the globe. Recently, high-resolution climate impacts forecasts generated by Ian and colleagues in the Climate Impact Lab have appeared in a wide range of outlets, including public reports on climate risk by BlackRock, Inc. – the world’s largest asset management firm – and a new tool on Realtor.com and Redfin displaying property-level flood risk projections. He is particularly passionate about the climate of the American West, where he can be found sliding around on snow, dirt, or rocks depending on the season.

Dr. Jen Kay (she/her/hers) is an Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU). With her group and scientific collaborators around the world, Jen works at the nexus of observations and modeling to understand the processes controlling climate change and variability. A specific focus is connecting global coupled climate modeling with observed cloud, precipitation, and sea ice processes. She teaches data and climate science to undergraduate and graduate students at CU-Boulder. She is passionate about communicating climate science and all things cold. In addition to POW, Jen works with Polar Bears International, a non-profit whose research, education, and action programs address the issues that are endangering polar bears. Jen has authored over 80+ peer-reviewed papers about climate change and variability. In recognition of her contributions to climate science, she has received a CU Provost Faculty Achievement Award (2018), the American Geophysical Union Future Horizons in Climate Science Turco Lectureship (2018), and the American Meteorological Society Houghton G. Houghton Award (2016).

Joanna C. Carey is an Associate Professor of Earth & Environmental Science at Babson College. At Babson, Joanna teaches Introduction to Oceanography to non-science majors, among other courses. Joanna's research focuses on answering fundamental questions regarding ecosystem processes in the context of rapid global change. Specifically, she examines how climate change is altering nutrient cycling along the land-ocean continuum, with a focus on wetland, river, forest, and tundra ecosystems. After completing her Ph.D. in Earth Science from Boston University (2013), she was awarded an NSF Earth Science post-doctoral fellowship to study climate change in Alaska at the Marine Biological Laboratory. Joanna completed her M.S. in Environmental Science from Yale University (2007), and her B.S. in Environmental Policy & Planning from Virginia Tech (2005). Joanna is passionate about communicating the science of climate change to the public in order to facilitate rapid and effective solutions to this large societal problem.

Dr. Anne Nolin is a professor in the Department of Geography and leads the Computational Mountain Studies Research Group at the University of Nevada, Reno where she also serves as Director of the Graduate Program of Hydrologic Sciences. Her research focuses on snow hydrology and climate change, snow-forest interactions, and mountains as social-ecological systems. Dr. Nolin has over three decades of experience in remote sensing, field measurements, and modeling of changing snow and ice. She has worked in Greenland, Alaska, Switzerland, New Zealand, and across the western US. Dr. Nolin and her students have published on at-risk snow, impacts of wildfire on snow, and new ways of mapping snow and ice from space.

Dr. David A. Robinson is a Distinguished Professor of Geography at Rutgers University and New Jersey’s State Climatologist. He has expertise in the collection and archiving of accurate climatic data, and is interested in climate change (particularly state and regional climate issues), global snow cover dynamics, and interactions of snow cover with other climate elements. As state climatologist, he works with a wide array of user communities who require climatological expertise to solve problems. Dave has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, is past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, has received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Association of Geographers, and is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.

Dr. Keith Musselman grew up on the U.S. East Coast where his excitement for the science of weather, climate and snow grew from his love for skiing, snowboarding and surfing. As a hydrologist at the University of Colorado, he studies how mountain snowpack supports sustainable forest ecosystems and water supply for people, wildlife and agriculture. Motivated by the thrill of scientific discovery and collaborative communication, Keith develops approaches with diverse groups, including Indigenous leaders, to inform sustainable adaptation and decision strategies. Effective communication of climate change issues to diverse groups and the public is a central theme of his work. Keith conducts fieldwork on three continents and uses supercomputers to assess climate change impacts on water availability, streamflow, and flood risk. His background includes degrees in Geology, Hydrology and Water Resources, and Civil Engineering, and training at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Keith is committed to building and encouraging a diverse research community and believes that society collectively benefits from the storytelling and communication that is made richer by our differences. Efforts to be more inclusive improve our knowledge and better serve smart decision strategies of individuals, organizations, and policymakers. Keith has authored over 30 publications, some of which are ranked in the top 1% of referenced Earth Science papers. His work has been featured broadly in media including the New York Times. He received an Outstanding Mentor Award from the University of Colorado in 2021 and serves on the NOAA CMIP6 Task Force that informs the organization on the utility of the next generation of climate models. In his free time, Keith skis, snowboards, bikes, and floats rivers - increasingly finding himself in hot pursuit of his two young groms as the family recreates in Colorado and beyond.

Dr. Jim White is the Director of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and a Professor in both the Department of Geological Sciences and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the founding Director of Environmental Studies Department at CU, which now has about 1,000 majors per year. He is actively engaged in exploring new paradigms of interdisciplinary education, and has worked steadily to break down barriers between the social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, journalism, arts and business to better educate and train students and conduct research in the area of sustainability and environmental change.  His two main research areas are paleo- environmental reconstructions from ice cores and past and modern controls on the carbon cycle. He worked with Danish colleagues to first document the astonishing speed and magnitude of abrupt climate changes as seen in the Greenland ice cores.

He is an author on over 150 peer-reviewed publications, including more than thirty in the high-profile journals Science and Nature. He is a member of ISI Highly Cited, a group of the most highly cited authors that comprises less than one-half of one percent of all publishing researchers in the geosciences.

He has served on a number of national and international committees including the Chairmanship of the Polar Research Board of the US National Academy of Science, two US National Academy studies (chair of one on abrupt climate change), and co-leader of large multi-national research programs, most recently the North-Eem deep ice core in northern Greenland.

Watch Dr. White discuss “The Future of Skiing and the Science Behind the Snow” on a panel hosted in April 2017 at Arapahoe Basin and watch his interview with POW Riders Alliance member Jake Black at Dr. White’s offices at INSTAAR about science and politics in March 2017.

Dr. Kevin E. Trenberth is a distinguished senior scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. From New Zealand, he obtained his Sc. D. in meteorology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been prominent in most of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientific assessments of Climate Change and has also extensively served the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) in numerous ways. He chaired the WCRP Global Energy and Water Exchanges (GEWEX) project from 2010-2013.  He has also served on many U.S. national committees. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the American Association for Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has published over 520 scientific articles or papers, including 234 refereed journal articles, and has given many invited scientific talks as well as appearing in a number of television, radio programs and newspaper articles. In 2017, he was the recipient of the AGU Roger Revelle Medal for outstanding contributions in atmospheric sciences.

Read Dr. Trenberth’s blog post on Trump’s March 2017 executive order on climate. Watch the Denver Channel’s 2017 interview with Dr. Trenberth on “How will climate change affect Colorado?,” the 2017 Vail Symposium that discusses science, politics, and climate change with Dr. Trenberth as a panelist, and his 2015 lecture “What’s going on with El Nino?”

Dr. Tad Pfeffer is a glaciologist, geophysicist, and photographer at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a Fellow of the University’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering. Pfeffer’s research is focused on glacier mechanics and dynamics, and particularly on dynamics of ocean—ending glaciers and glacier contributions to sea level. He has done field research for more than 30 years in glacier regions from Alaska to Antarctica to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Pfeffer also leads the long-term study of Columbia Glacier on Alaska’s South Central Coast, one the world’s most extensively studied and most rapidly changing glaciers. He has served as an advisor to the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP), and is a Lead Author for Chapter 13 (Sea Level Change) in the IPCC Fifth Assessment/Working Group I. He also operates WT Pfeffer Geophysical Consultants, LLC, providing consulting modeling, analysis, and assessments on sea level rise and glacier-related hazards.

In addition to his scientific work, Pfeffer’s photography has appeared in many publications in the US and Europe. He is the author of The Opening of a New Landscape: Columbia Glacier at Mid-Retreat, published by the American Geophysical Union in 2007. His most recent book is The Hand of the Small Town Builder, published in March 2014, by David R. Godine.

Dr. Thomas H. Painter is a Research Scientist of Hydrology and serves as a Principal Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology and a Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the Principal Investigator of the JPL Airborne Snow Observatory, an integrated imaging spectrometer and LiDAR system to give the first-ever comprehensive, near real-time maps of snow water equivalent and snow reflectivity in mountain basins. His areas of interest are snow hydrology, radiative impacts of light-absorbing impurities on snow and glacier melt, water resources from mountain snow and ice, multispectral remote sensing and imaging spectroscopy. Dr. Painter has pioneered our understanding of the impacts of dust emission from land use change and black carbon from industrialization on snow and ice cover in mountain systems and the hydrologic response. He has also developed cutting edge remote sensing and field models for snow properties from spaceborne and airborne multispectral to imaging spectrometer sensors. He received a Ph.D. and MA in Geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a B.S. in Mathematics from Colorado State University. He is President of the Cryosphere Sciences Focus Group of the American Geophysical Union.

Dr. Gregory B. Greenwood, a natural resources specialist trained in agricultural ecology, population ecology, and ruminant nutrition, is Executive Director of the Mountain Research Initiative (MRI) in Berne, Switzerland. His mandate is to develop a strategy to increase and focus global change research in mountain regions throughout the world as part of IHDP and IGBP programs, and as a policy objective of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Greg Greenwood was previously Bioenergy and Climate Science Advisor for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Resources/Science Advisor for the California Resources Agency, Sacramento. He has extensive experience with and publications on land use development and ecology, including global change in mountains. MRD Assistant Editor Susanne Wymann von Dach interviewed Greg Greenwood in August 2005.

Dr. Jennifer Francis is a research professor with the Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, studying Arctic climate change and Arctic-global climate linkages, with roughly 40 peer-reviewed publications on these topics.

She has been at Rutgers since 1994, where she has taught courses in satellite remote sensing and climate-change issues and co-founded and co-directed the Rutgers Climate and Environmental Change Initiative. During the 13 months from July 2009-July 2010, her family of four spent a year sailing through Central America. She and her husband circumnavigated the world in a sailboat from 1980-1985, including Cape Horn and the Arctic, which is when she first became interested in Arctic weather and climate.  Francis earned a B.S. in meteorology from San Jose State University and a Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from the University of Washington.

Dr. Elizabeth (Liz) Burakowski is a Research Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of New Hampshire. Liz learned to ski in 1988 at Suicide Six in Vermont. She switched to snowboarding in 1994 and picked up splitboarding in 2013.

Dr. B's research focuses on winter climate change in the northeastern United States, snowpack properties, and the exchange of water and energy at the land-atmosphere interface. She uses climate models, remote sensing, and ground-based observations to study how changes in snowpack intersect with changes in land cover. Liz has produced two reports with Protect Our Winters – Climate Impacts on the Winter Tourism Economy in the United States (2012) and The Economic Contributions of Winter Sports in a Changing Climate (2018).

In addition to serving on the Protect Our Winters Science Alliance, Liz is also a member of the American Alpine Club's Climate Task Force, Ambassador to the Community Snow Observations Project, and a member of the Eastern Snow Conference Research Committee.

Dr. Burakowski earned her BA in Geology from Wellesley College in 2003, her Masters in Earth Science in 2007, and Ph.D. in Earth and Environmental Science in 2013.

Read Dr. Burakowski’s article, “If you like skiing or snowboarding, you should care about climate change,” published in The Guardian.

Dr. Jason Box is a research scientist and currently lives in Copenhagen.  He has made sixteen expeditions to the Greenland ice sheet since 1994 and his time on the inland ice exceeds 1 year. He was awarded a NASA grant to support the installation and maintenance of Greenland EIS cameras. Dr. Box is active in Greenland fieldwork for EIS and is using EIS photos from Greenland to measure glacier speed changes, putting precise numbers on glacier flow sensitivity to climate. As an authority on the relationship between Greenland glaciers and climate, he’s authored or co-authored more than 26 peer-reviewed publications directly related to ice and climate and has led, since 2003, the annual Greenland entries for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and American Meteorological Society’s “State of the Climate” report. He was a contributing author to “Climate Change 2007″, the definitive report on the science of global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Follow Dr. Box’s blog posts on Dark Snow, read his 2015 New Yorker article with Naomi Klein on “Why a climate deal is the best hope for peace,” and his Huffington Post piece titled “Earth’s ice is melting much faster than forecast. Here’s why that’s worrying.”