Professor Graeme Stephens
Department of Atmospheric Science
Colorado State University
Ft. Collins, Colorado

Honors/Positions

Fellow of the American Meteorological Society; Fellow of the American Geophysical Union; Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA; Past editor of both the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences and the Journal of Geophysical Research; Member and Chairman of a number of national and international committees including AMS Committee on Atmospheric Radiation and WMO Joint Scientific Committee Working Group on Radiation Fluxes. He is currently the PI of NASA's CloudSat Mission (http://cloudsat.atmos.colostate.edu/).

Career Overview

Professor Stephens completed his B.S. degree with honors from the University of Melbourne in 1973 and received his Ph.D. degree in 1977 from the same university. He was appointed to the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research in 1977 as a research scientist and was promoted to senior research scientist in 1982. During 1979 and 1980 Dr. Stephens was a post-doctoral research student at the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. He then joined the faculty of that department as an Associate Professor in 1984 and in the spring of 1991 was promoted to Professor. Dr. Stephens professional activities include: Editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences; Member of NASA/TRMM Science Team; Chairman NSF Facilities Advisory Panel; Chairman AMS Committee on Atmospheric Radiation; Chairman of WMO Joint Scientific Committee Working Group on Radiation Fluxes; Member AMS, OSA; Member, National Research Council, Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (BASC). Recipient of the CSU Halliburton New Faculty Research Award and the AMS Henry G. Houghton Award. He is a member of the AGU and a Fellow of the AMS. Dr. Stephens research activities focus on atmospheric radiation and on the application of remote sensing in climate research, with particular emphasis on understanding the role of hydrological processes in climate change. He is currently the PI of NASA's Cloudsat Mission. His work has dealt with the derivation of cloud properties from both space borne and aircraft measurements and the application of this information to problems of better understanding the physical processes that define the Earth's atmosphere. Other activities include the development of doppler lidar for measurement of boundary layer winds, studies in atmospheric visibility and the role of clouds in large scale dynamics. Dr. Stephens has published over 66 reviewed articles and is the author of Remote Sensing of the Lower Atmosphere: An Introduction. Oxford Univ. Press, March 1994.

Research Interests

Atmospheric Radiation, Radiative Transfer and Remote Sensing, Climate Change and Climate Modeling, Atmospheric Energetics and Hydrology