After five years at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., Natalie Mahowald decided making climate models wasn’t enough—she wanted to teach too.
“I love teaching, that’s why I came back to a university. I love it when you can get a student excited about learning,” she says. “And I think environmental issues are important so I’d like to get more students interested.”
Her desire to share what she knows is born of her own hunger for knowledge. “From when I was really young, I loved to learn. When I was 12. I decided I wanted a Ph.D., not that I knew what a Ph.D. was,” she says with a laugh.
Upon earning a B.S. in physics from Washington University, however, Mahowald got a job as an air pollution consultant rather than enroll in graduate school. “I struggled in college with what to do with my life,” she says. “I loved math and science, but wanted to do something socially relevant.”
But just one year later, she was back in school, this time at the University of Michigan, where she earned an M.S. in natural resource policy, focusing on air quality. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she first starting working with NCAR, where the bulk of her research was on incorporating dust into global climate models.
Blown far from the world’s deserts, dust has a complex and uncertain relationship to climate. By blocking sunlight, dust clouds can provide shade and cool the Earth’s surface. But they also absorb the sun’s heat, warming the atmosphere. By providing essential minerals such as iron and phosphorous, dust can stimulate plant growth. Marine plants can remove carbon from the atmosphere for millennia when they sink to the depths of the ocean, and thus help sequester carbon dioxide. But some phytoplankton may emit a gas that becomes acidic sulfate, which can cool the atmosphere by scattering sunlight. And ocean biota may also release methane and nitrous oxide, gases that contribute to global warming.
Working with hundreds of scientists from around the world, Mahowald is helping to sort it all out. But don’t picture her traipsing the Sahara—the source of most of that dust—or in the middle of the Atlantic. Her work takes place on NCAR’s supercomputer. “I’m mostly a modeler and analyst of observations,” she says. “I don’t touch a data point until it’s digital.”
Mahowald is looking forward to getting more of that data from across campus. “I’m excited to come to Cornell because of the terrestrial biogeochemists here,” she says. “There’s a lot of questions I’d love to get more collaborators on.”
Prof. Mahowald's Web page
