Christopher Landsea, formerly a research meteorologist with Hurricane Research Division of Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory at NOAA, is now the Science and Operations Officer at the National Hurricane Center. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. He earned his doctoral degree in Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University.

Research

Dr. Landsea has published a number of research papers on cyclones and hurricanes. He is the author of Hurricanes, Typhoons, and Tropical Cyclones: FAQ.^[1] He also has been the lead scientist in the Atlantic hurricane reanalysis since 1997.

On global warming and hurricanes

In January, 2005, Landsea withdrew from his participation in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Landsea claimed the IPCC had become politicized and the leadership ignored his concerns.^[2] Landsea does not believe that global warming has a strong influence on hurricanes: "global warming might be enhancing hurricane winds, but only by 1 percent or 2 percent". He strongly questions the accuracy of the historical global hurricane database for comparisons with current observations, citing an uncounted, catastrophic 1970 storm as an example.^[3] According to agency emails gathered by Salon and later released by Rep. Henry Waxman, Republican administrators chose Landsea over another scientist in the NOAA to speak to the media about the link between hurricanes and climate change after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.^[4][5]

In an interview on PBS, Christopher Landsea said "we certainly see substantial warming in the ocean and atmosphere over the last several decades on the order of a degree Fahrenheit, and I have no doubt a portion of that, at least, is due to greenhouse warming. The question is whether we're seeing any real increases in the hurricane activity." He went on to say "with the Atlantic hurricanes in particular, they're due to changes both in the ocean as well as the atmosphere. Just changing the ocean where it's a little bit warmer isn't sufficient." As for climate change affecting hurricane strength, Landsea said that global warming theories and numerical modeling suggest only that "hurricanes like Katrina and Rita may have been stronger due to global warming but maybe by one or two miles per hour."^[6]

Roger A. Pielke (Jr), who originally published Landsea's letter,^[2] expressed his opinion that the actual IPCC report "maintain[s] consistency with the actual balance of opinion(s) in the community of relevant experts." Regarding IPCC politics, Pielke suggested that anyone who fails to see that the IPCC talks had political elements "isn't paying attention." ^[7]

Awards

• 2007 NOAA Administrator's Award for "establishing and administrating the Joint Hurricane Testbed, NOAA's first U.S. Weather Research Program testbed, accelerating research into operations, greatly improving forecasts." http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hrd_sub/awards.html
• United States Department of Commerce Bronze Medal Award for Superior Federal Service (Oct 2000)(co-recipient) for "issuing the accurate and first official physically based Atlantic Seasonal Hurricane Outlooks for the 1998/1999 seasons, based upon new research"http://www.oar.noaa.gov/organization/medals/bronze_goldenberg_landsea.html
• American Meteorological Society's Banner I. Miller Award (May 1993)(co-recipient) for the "best contribution to the science of hurricane and tropical weather forecasting published during the years 1990 - 1992. "http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories/s854.htm

References

External links

• Christopher Landsea biography page
• Recent Landsea publications and submissions