Gerald R. North


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Gerald R. North is distinguished professor of meteorology and of oceanography, holder of the Harold J. Haynes Endowed Chair in Geosciences at Texas A&M University, and former head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M.

Prior to his tenure at Texas A&M, he was a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, a senior visiting scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and a scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. At Goddard, he was the initial proposer and first study scientist for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission. North's research investigates climate change and determines its origins. Most of his recent work has been on estimating the strengths of forced response signals in the climate system over the last century.

Dr. North is coauthor of An Introduction to Atmospheric Thermodynamics (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and served as an editor for the Report of the NRC/NAS Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2000 Years (National Academies Press, 2006). Recent articles in peer-reviewed journals include "Future Climate of the Continental United States," Choices Magazine (2008); "Role of Water Vapor Feedback on the Amplitude of Season Cycle in the Global Mean Surface Air Temperature," Geophysical Research Letters (2008); "An Inconvenient Truth and the Scientists," Geojournal (2008); "Thermal Decay Modes in Simple Climate Models," Tellus (2007); "Analysis of the Correlations between Atmospheric Boundary-Layer and Free-Tropospheric Temperatures in the Tropics," Geophysical Research Letters (2006).

Dr. North is the 2008 recipient of the Jule G. Charney Award from the American Meteorological Society for "groundbreaking research on climate models, atmospheric statistics, and satellite mission development." He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Geophysical Union.

Dr. North has a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Tennessee (1960) and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1966).