Dr. Allegra N. LeGrande

BIOGRAPHY:

Future climate change will likely be beyond the range of the observational 'training period' over which all of our state-of-the-art climate models were designed. I specialize in finding ways to characterize climates more extreme than the historical period, implenting a means to validate the climate model against these extremes, and finally improving the model in instances where there is a mismatch between simulated and inferred (from proxy archives) climates. I am interested in the hydrologic cycle, and in particular tracers of the hydrologic cycle such as water isotopologues. These tracers are useful for establishing the provenance and (rainout) history of air parcels. They are also useful as a tracer of past climates (ice cores, cave deposits, ocean sediment cores, etc.). I do experiments with a general circulation model (the kind used in predicting future climate change) to discover details about the hydrologic cycle in the past and present in hopes of improving our ability to understand this part of the climate in the future.