Jason E Smerdon

Professor of Climate, M.A. in Climate and Society, Columbia Climate School
Co-Senior Director for Education,
Affiliated with: Ocean and Climate Physics, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) Columbia Climate School
Co-Director, MS in Climate
P.O. Box 1000 61 Route 9W Palisades, NY 10964-1000

BIOGRAPHY:

Jason E. Smerdon is a Professor of Climate within the Columbia Climate School, Co-Senior Director for Education, and Co-Director of the Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development. He teaches courses on climate, environmental change and sustainable development to undergraduate and graduate students. Smerdon also lectures widely in public and private settings on the subject of climate change and its social dimensions.

Smerdon’s research focuses on climate variability and change during the past several millennia and how past climates can help us understand future climate change. He publishes widely in the scientific literature on paleoclimate reconstruction techniques, the dynamics of past climate change and variability, and on assessing climate model simulations of the past and future using paleoclimatic information. He is co-author (with Ed Mathez) of the textbook Climate Change: The Science of Global Warming and Our Energy Future (Columbia University Press, September 2018).

Smerdon received his B.A. in physics from Gustavus Adolphus College and his Ph.D. in applied physics from the University of Michigan.

VIDEO

PROJECTS

Only select projects listed below

Name	Start Date	End Date
Collaborative Research: Fossil Coral Estimates of Central Tropical Pacific SST and Hydrological Variability during the last Millennium	9/1/11	8/31/14
Collaborative Research: P2C2 - Locally-constrained Climate Field Reconstructions of the Last Millennium: Methods and Application	8/1/11	7/31/13
Collaborative Research: P2C2--Derivation of Ensemble and Joint-Variable Climate Field Reconstruction	11/1/16	10/31/19
Comparing data and model estimates of hydroclimate variability and change over the Common Era	2/15/16	9/15/16
Continental Scale Droughts in North America: Their Frequency, Character and Causes Over the Past Millennium and Near Term Future	7/1/14	6/30/18
P2C2: Diagnosing the Dynamics of Past and Future North American Megadroughts	3/1/19	3/31/22
PIRE: Climate Research Education in the Americas using Tree-Ring and Cave Sediment Examples (PIRE-CREATE)	9/1/17	8/31/21
Reconstruction and Dynamics of Interhemispheric Hydroclimate Variability Between the Americas	6/15/16	5/31/19
Regional Influences of Vegetation on Complex Droughts in North America	9/1/20	8/31/22
Decadal Regime Shifts in the Pacific Ocean: Mechanisms, Hydroclimatic Imprints, and Predictability	9/1/21	8/31/24
Collaborative Research: Diagnosing Global Climatic Responses to Large Volcanic Eruptions in Climate Reconstructions and Model Simulations	9/1/23	8/31/26
The Role of Vegetation in Past and Future Global Hydroclimatic Change	8/15/21	8/14/24

103 PUBLICATIONS ON COLUMBIA | ACADEMIC COMMONS

Only select publications listed below

Name	Published Date
Drivers of Coral Reconstructed Salinity in the South China Sea and Maritime Continent: The Influence of the 1976 Indo-Pacific Climate Shift	2022
Growing impact of wildfire on western US water supply	2022
Influence of the South American Low-Level Jet on the Austral Summer Precipitation Trend in Southeastern South America	2022
Large infrequent rain events dominate the hydroclimate of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)	2022
Megadroughts in the Common Era and the Anthropocene	2022
Progress and uncertainties in global and hemispheric temperature reconstructions of the Common Era	2022
The Role of Internal Variability in ITCZ Changes Over the Last Millennium	2022
A pseudoproxy assessment of why climate field reconstruction methods perform the way they do in time and space	2021
Changing hydroclimate dynamics and the 19th to 20th century wetting trend in the English Channel region of northwest Europe	2021
Disentangling the Regional Climate Impacts of Competing Vegetation Responses to Elevated Atmospheric CO2	2021
Global hydroclimatic response to tropical volcanic eruptions over the last millennium	2021
Global Temperature Responses to Large Tropical Volcanic Eruptions in Paleo Data Assimilation Products and Climate Model Simulations Over the Last Millennium	2021
Projected Changes to Hydroclimate Seasonality in the Continental United States	2021
Uncertainties, Limits, and Benefits of Climate Change Mitigation for Soil Moisture Drought in Southwestern North America	2021
U.S. Pacific Coastal Droughts Are Predominantly Driven by Internal Atmospheric Variability	2021
A quantitative hydroclimatic context for the European Great Famine of 1315-17	2020
Dynamical and hydrological changes in climate simulations of the last millennium	2020
Six hundred years of South American tree rings reveal an increase in severe hydroclimatic events since mid-20th century	2020
Twenty-First Century Drought Projections in the CMIP6 Forcing Scenarios	2020
Investigating the Causes of Increased Twentieth-Century Fall Precipitation over the Southeastern United States	2019
Oceanic and radiative forcing of medieval megadroughts in the American southwest	2019
A reconstruction of global hydroclimate and dynamical variables over the Common Era	2018
Blue Water Trade-Offs With Vegetation in a CO2-Enriched Climate	2018
Coupled Model Biases Breed Spurious Low-Frequency Variability in the Tropical Pacific Ocean	2018
Revisiting the Leading Drivers of Pacific Coastal Drought Variability in the Contiguous United States	2018
A new archive of large volcanic events over the past millennium derived from reconstructed summer temperatures	2017
Comparing proxy and model estimates of hydroclimate variability and change over the Common Era	2017
Impacts of the Last Glacial Cycle on ground surface temperature reconstructions over the last millennium	2017
Influence of internal variability on population exposure to hydroclimatic changes	2017
Precipitation, Temperature, and Teleconnection Signals across the Combined North American, Monsoon Asia, and Old World Drought Atlases	2017
Projected drought risk in 1.5°C and 2°C warmer climates	2017
Temperature Covariance in Tree Ring Reconstructions and Model Simulations Over the Past Millennium	2017
The 2016 Southeastern U.S. Drought: An Extreme Departure From Centennial Wetting and Cooling	2017
The Curious Case of Projected Twenty-First-Century Drying but Greening in the American West	2017
Comparison between spatio-temporal random processes and application to climate model data	2016
Detecting Volcanic Eruptions in Temperature Reconstructions by Designed Break-Indicator Saturation	2016
European summer temperatures since Roman times	2016
First assessment of continental energy storage in CMIP5 simulations	2016
Internal ocean-atmosphere variability drives megadroughts in Western North America	2016
North American megadroughts in the Common Era: reconstructions and simulations	2016
Reconstructing Earth's surface temperature over the past 2000 years: the science behind the headlines	2016
Relative impacts of mitigation, temperature, and precipitation on 21st-century megadrought risk in the American Southwest	2016
Simulation of air and ground temperatures in PMIP3/CMIP5 last millennium simulations: implications for climate reconstructions from borehole temperature profiles	2016
The improbable but unexceptional occurrence of megadrought clustering in the American West during the Medieval Climate Anomaly	2016
Are Simulated Megadroughts in the North American Southwest Forced?	2015
Bridging Past and Future Climate across Paleoclimatic Reconstructions, Observations, and Models: A Hydroclimate Case Study	2015
Continental-scale temperature variability in PMIP3 simulations and PAGES 2k regional temperature reconstructions over the past millennium	2015
Contribution of anthropogenic warming to California drought during 2012–2014	2015
Ground surface temperature and continental heat gain: uncertainties from underground	2015
Impact of borehole depths on reconstructed estimates of ground surface temperature histories and energy storage	2015
Model-dependent spatial skill in pseudoproxy experiments testing climate field reconstruction methods for the Common Era	2015
North American Pancontinental Droughts in Model Simulations of the Last Millennium	2015
Revising midlatitude summer temperatures back to A.D. 600 based on a wood density network	2015
Signals and memory in tree-ring width and density data	2015
Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains	2015
Winter-to-summer precipitation phasing in southwestern North America: A multicentury perspective from paleoclimatic model-data comparisons	2015
Climate field reconstruction uncertainty arising from multivariate and nonlinear properties of predictors	2014
Evaluating Climate Field Reconstruction Techniques Using Improved Emulations of Real-World Conditions	2014
Global Warming and 21st Century Drying	2014
Hydroclimate Variability and Change in the Prairie Pothole Region, the “Duck Factory” of North America	2014
Late winter temperature response to large tropical volcanic eruptions in temperate western North America: Relationship to ENSO phases	2014
Numerical studies on the Impact of the Last Glacial Cycle on recent borehole temperature profiles: implications for terrestrial energy balance	2014
Pan-Continental Droughts in North America over the Last Millennium	2014
The worst North American drought year of the last millennium: 1934	2014
A Pseudoproxy Evaluation of Bayesian Hierarchical Modeling and Canonical Correlation Analysis for Climate Field Reconstructions over Europe	2013
Continental-Scale Temperature Variability during the Past Two Millennia	2013
Continental-Scale Temperature Variability during the Past Two Millennia: Supplementary Information	2013
Megadroughts in Southwestern North America in ECHO-G Millennial Simulations and Their Comparison to Proxy Drought Reconstructions	2013
Multidecadal variability in East African hydroclimate controlled by the Indian Ocean	2013
Reply to “Comments on ‘Erroneous Model Field Representations in Multiple Pseudoproxy Studies: Corrections and Implications’”	2013
Stationarity of the Tropical Pacific Teleconnection to North America in CMIP5/PMIP3 Model Simulations	2013
A Pacific Centennial Oscillation Predicted by Coupled GCMs	2012
Climate models as a test bed for climate reconstruction methods: pseudoproxy experiments	2012
Comparative performance of paleoclimate field and index reconstructions derived from climate proxies and noise-only predictors	2012
Defining spatial comparison metrics for evaluation of paleoclimatic field reconstructions of the Common Era	2012
Discussion of: A statistical analysis of multiple temperature proxies: Are reconstructions of surface temperatures over the last 1000 years reliable?	2011
Impact of maximum borehole depths on inverted temperature histories in borehole paleoclimatology	2011
Spatial performance of four climate field reconstruction methods targeting the Common Era	2011
The anomalous winter of 1783-1784: Was the Laki eruption or an analog of the 2009-2010 winter to blame?	2011
A Pseudoproxy Evaluation of the CCA and RegEM Methods for Reconstructing Climate Fields of the Last Millennium	2010
Erroneous Model Field Representations in Multiple Pseudoproxy Studies: Corrections and Implications	2010
Propagation of linear surface air temperature trends into the terrestrial subsurface	2010
Characterizing land surface processes: A quantitative analysis using air-ground thermal orbits	2009
Comment on "Robustness of proxy-based climate field reconstruction methods" by Michael E. Mann et al.	2008
On the Origin of the Standardization Sensitivity in RegEM Climate Field Reconstructions	2008
Pacific and Indian Ocean climate signals in a tree-ring record of Java monsoon drought	2008
Tropical climate influences on drought variability over Java, Indonesia	2008
Characterizing Land–Atmosphere Coupling and the Implications for Subsurface Thermodynamics	2007
Comments on "Testing the Fidelity of Methods Used in Proxy-Based Reconstructions of Past Climate": The Role of the Standardization Interval	2007
Detection of Human Influence on a New, Validated 1500-Year Temperature Reconstruction	2007
Effects of bottom boundary placement on subsurface heat storage: Implications for climate model simulations	2007
Initial Sustainability Report: Barnard College, 2007	2007
Daily, seasonal, and annual relationships between air and subsurface temperatures	2006
Five centuries of climate change in Australia: the view from underground	2006
Simulating heat transport of harmonic temperature signals in the Earth's shallow subsurface: Lower-boundary sensitivities	2006
Variable seasonal coupling between air and ground temperatures: A simple representation in terms of subsurface thermal diffusivity	2005
Air-ground temperature coupling and subsurface propagation of annual temperature signals	2004
Borehole climate reconstructions: Spatial structure and hemispheric averages	2004
A model study of the effects of climatic precipitation changes on ground temperatures	2003
Conduction-dominated heat transport of the annual temperature signal in soil	2003

PUBLICATIONS

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Staff and Affiliates Directory

Jason E Smerdon

VIDEO

PROJECTS

103 PUBLICATIONS ON COLUMBIA | ACADEMIC COMMONS

PUBLICATIONS