Caroline Ummenhofer

Caroline C. Ummenhofer is a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where she studies extreme weather events with a particular focus on the Indian Ocean. Ummenhofer makes an effort to connect her discoveries about predicting extreme weather events and precipitation to helping the nations affected. Ummenhofer wrote her thesis on the "Southern Hemisphere Regional Precipitation and Climate Variability: Extremes, Trends and Predictability," which won the Uwe Radok Award by the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society in the category of atmosphere/ocean/climate science. Mean global temperature records begin around 1880, and many developing countries by the Indian Ocean only have reliable meteorology starting in the 1970s. This study connected extreme droughts in Australia with conditions in Indian Ocean instead of the Pacific Ocean.

In 2016, L. Li, R. W. Schmitt, C. C. Ummenhofer, and K. B. Karnauskas published North Atlantic Salinity as a Predictor of Sahel Rainfall which predicted precipitation in the U.S. Southwest more accurately than conventional forecasting.

Selected publications

Awards and honors

Uwe Radok Award by the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (2008) Humboldt Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bonn, Germany (2014) James B. Macelwane Medal by the American Geophysical Union (2018)