Download Mote AGU 2-page CV - AGU Elections

Philip Mote, Oregon State University
Corvallis, Oregon
United States of America
Director, Oregon Climate Change Research Institute and Oregon Climate Services
Professor, College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences!
[email protected]
HISTORY OF EMPLOYMENT
2009-pres
Director, Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (occri.net); Professor, College of
Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis; and Director, Oregon
Climate Service, OSU.
2003-2009 State Climatologist - Office of Washington State Climatologist, UW Seattle, WA
1998-2009 Research Scientist - Climate Impacts Group, UW Seattle, WA
1996-2009 Research Scientist, Consultant - NorthWest Research Associates, Bellevue, WA
DEGREES
Harvard University, Physics (cum laude), AB 1987
University of Washington, Atmospheric Sciences, PhD 1994
NARRATIVE OF RESEARCH EXPERIENCE
My scientific journey has been characterized by a desire to inform societally important decisions
through research. As a physics major, I quickly figured out that I wanted to study geosciences because it
had a more intuitive connection and clearer relevance for the public. I won a summer research fellowship
that allowed me to spend the summer after my junior year doing physical oceanography at Harvard with
Allen Robinson, including ten days on a research vessel off the California coast. After struggling through
a graduate-level course in atmospheric dynamics my senior year, in which I remember Prof. Brian Farrell
casually mentioning that humans had dramatically increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, which
should warm the Earth (this was 1986), I decided to study atmospheric sciences and chose UW.
While a graduate student with Jim Holton at UW, I worked on simulating stratospheric water vapor
using the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Climate Model (CCM2), and I
traveled frequently to NCAR to work with Byron Boville. My postdoctoral experiences with Bob Harwood at University of Edinburgh enabled me to interact with many of the UK’s best climate scientists. I
returned to the Seattle area to work at Northwest Research Associates with Tim Dunkerton. My bestknown paper from that era, “An Atmospheric Tape Recorder,” showed clear evidence from several satellite instruments that air rising through the tropical tropopause carried evidence in its water vapor concentration of the seasonally varying temperature at the tropical tropopause, like marks on a magnetic tape.
The title metaphor was from a suggestion of Michael McIntyre, who had predicted this phenomenon.
Four years after graduating, the next stage of my journey took me back to UW where I worked with
the Climate Impacts Group (CIG). Though my job was primarily outreach (to date I have given roughly
800 talks), I supported the scientific endeavors of CIG by publishing papers documenting regional trends
in climate, analyzing climate model output, and most importantly, using observations of mountain snowpack (which were taken to support water supply forecasting) in the western US to document climatedriven declines. The main paper on this subject, which corroborated the observations with independent
hydrologic modeling by Dennis Lettenmaier and his group, is now my most-cited paper with almost 1000
citations. Along the way I revived the state climate office for Washington, and now I co-lead the state climate office in Oregon.
In 2009 I moved to OSU to start a new research institute, the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (OCCRI). Created by the state legislature, OCCRI serves the state and since 2010 has been the host
institution for the NOAA Climate Impacts Research Consortium (the Regional Integrated Sciences and
Assessments, RISA) for the Northwest and also the Department of the Interior NW Climate Science Center. Both entities, which I lead, develop stakeholder-driven applied climate research, training, and communication efforts to support decision-making in a changing climate. In partnership with Oxford, my research group within OCCRI has led a ‘superensemble’ regional climate modeling effort using crowdsourced climate modeling.
As a participant and then leader in climate ‘boundary organizations’, roughly half of my 110 publications are peer-reviewed journal articles and about half are publications intended to convey science to nonspecialists: reports for IPCC, NRC, National Climate Assessment, and more focused reports: for example,
sea level rise in Washington state, a guidance document for an investor-owned electric utility, and a vulnerability assessment conducted last year for three tribes on the Washington coast.
KEY PUBLICATIONS
Dalton, M.M., L. Benda, M. Case, S. Chisholm Hatfield, N. Cohn, M. Conlin, J. Lawler, P. Mote, D.
Sharp, G. Reeves, P. Ruggiero, K. Serafin, 2016: Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment for the
Treaty of Olympia Tribes. A Report to the Quinault Indian Nation, Hoh Tribe, and Quileute Tribe. Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, Corvallis, OR.
Vano, J. A., J. B. Kim, D. E. Rupp, and P. W. Mote, 2016: Selecting climate change scenarios using impact-relevant sensitivities. Geophys. Research Letts. 42, no. 13 (2015): 5516-5525.
Li, S., P.W. Mote, D. Vickers, R. Mera, D.E. Rupp, A. Salahuddin, M.R. Allen, and R. G. Jones, 2015:
Evaluation of a regional climate modeling effort for the western US using a superensemble from climate- prediction.net. J. Clim, doi: 10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00808.1.
Mote, P.W., M.R. Allen, R.G. Jones, S.Li, R. Mera, D.E. Rupp, A. Salahuddin, and D. Vickers, 2015: Superensemble regional climate modeling for the western US. Bull. Amer. Meteorol. Soc, doi:
10.1175/BAMS-D- 14-00090.1.
Abatzoglou, J., D.E. Rupp, and P.W. Mote, 2014: Understanding seasonal climate variability and change
in the Pacific Northwest of the US. J. Climate, 27, 2125–2142 doi: 10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00218.1.
Rupp, D.E., P.W. Mote, F.E.L. Otto, and M.R. Allen, 2013: The human influence on the probability of low
precipitation in the central United States in 2012. [in Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 from a Climate
Perspective”]. Bull. Amer. Meteorol. Soc., 94 (9), S2-S6.
Mote, P.W., L. Brekke, P. Duffy, and E. Maurer, 2011: Guidelines for constructing climate scenarios.
EOS, Transactions, Amer. Geophys. Union, 92, doi:10.1029/ 2011EO310001.
Mote, P.W., and G. Kaser, 2007: The shrinking glaciers of Kilimanjaro: can global warming be blamed?
American Scientist, 95, 318–325.
Mote, P.W., A.F. Hamlet, M.P. Clark, and D.P. Lettenmaier, 2005: Declining mountain snowpack in western North America, Bull. of the Amer. Meteorol. Soc.,86, 39–49. (969 citations, 5/23/16)
Mote, P.W., K.H. Rosenlof, M.E. McIntyre, E.S. Carr, J.C. Gille, J.R. Holton, J.S. Kinnersley, H.C. Pumphrey, J.M. Russell III, and J.W. Waters, 1996: An atmospheric tape recorder: The imprint of tropical
tropopause temperatures on stratospheric water vapor. J. Geophys.Res., 101, 3989–4006 (577 citations)
AFFILIATIONS, FELLOWSHIPS, AND AWARDS
Adjunct Faculty, College of Public Health and Human Sciences, OSU, 2012-present
Affiliate Faculty, UW Department of Atmospheric Sciences, 2002-present.
University of Washington distinguished Staff Award 2008
Named one of the 25 most influential people in the Puget Sound region by Seattle Magazine, 2008.
As lead author of the conribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
NASA Group Achievement Award to the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite team, 2006.
NASA global change fellowship, 1991-1994; Harvard College Scholarship (meritorious award), 1986;
Rowland science fellowship, 1986.
Keynote speaker for dozens of meetings and public events; testimony to Congressional and state legislative committees over 12 times.
PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY MEMBERSHIP
American Geophysical Union
American Meteorological Society
American Association of State Climatologists