Vollmer Fries Lecture - Gavin Schmidt - April 19

“What Are Climate Models Good For?” Dr. Gavin Schmidt, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Vollmer W. Fries Lecture Series Friday, April 19th 4 - 6:00 p.m., EMPAC Concert Hall The School of Science is pleased to welcome Dr. Gavin Schmidt, deputy chief at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, as part of the Vollmer W. Fries lecture series and in conjunction with the 2013 Rensselaer Earth Week Sensing Environments festival. Dr. Schmidt will present a lecture on the use of climate models to explain current climate change and predict future climate scenarios. He will also examine the performance, credibility, and limitation of the models related to the assessment of short-term climate variability, the response of the climate system to external factors, and paleo-climate information. As a leader in climate science and modeling, Dr. Schmidt’s research interests lie in understanding the variability of the climate, both its internal variability and the response to external forcing. He has worked on education and outreach with the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Academy of Sciences. In addition, he is the co-author with Josh Wolfe of “Climate Change: Picturing the Science” (W. W. Norton, 2009), a collaboration between climate scientists and photographers. He was awarded the inaugural AGU Climate Communications Prize in 2011. Photo credit: Sam Eaton