Angie Pendergrass has a BS in meteorology/math and physics from the University of Miami, and an MS and PhD in atmospheric science from the University of Washington. She then joined the National Center for Atmospheric Research as an Advanced Studies Program postdoctoral research fellow. After moving to CIRES at the University of Colorado as a Visiting Fellow, she returned to NCAR as a Project Scientist. She also spent one year as a visitor at ETH-Zurich in Switzerland. She joined Cornell as an Assistant Professor in 2020.
Dr. Pendergrass's research focuses on extreme precipitation and its response to climate variability and change. She studies extreme precipitation and its change holistically, at planetary scales and in the context of the distribution of precipitation in intensity, space, and time. Her research is grounded in a top-down approach that considers fundamental questions about precipitation and its change, including: what role does precipitation play in the flow of energy through the climate system, and what can we learn about precipitation and its change from this? How have extreme precipitation events changed in the past, how will change in the future, and what processes drive these changes? How accurately do models simulate the hydrologic cycle, and how can we improve their accuracy? What are the causes and consequences of changes in the hydrologic cycle for circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, climate sensitivity, and society? In order to address these questions, she develops compact but powerful and useful metrics to describe the characteristics of precipitation. Her toolbox includes theory, analysis of observations, and a hierarchy of models from fully coupled climate models to radiative transfer models and heuristic stochastic models.
