Matthew Shupe

Matthew David Shupe (fl. 1995–present)

Personal life Matthew Shupe was born in Washington state but grew up in Idaho. He attended college in Colorado. After that, he studied mathematics and chemistry with a focus on atmospheric sciences at the University of Puget Sound in Washington state. He completed his studies in 1997 with a bachelor's degree in chemistry and mathematics.

In 2006, he received a master's degree in astrophysics and atmospheric sciences from the University of Colorado Boulder. In 2007, he received his doctorate there with a thesis on An intricate balance of liquid and ice: The properties, processes, and significance of Arctic stratiform mixed-phase clouds.

Shupe is married and has two sons. In leg 1 of MOSAiC (from 20 September 2019 to 13 December 2019) and leg 4 (from 8 June 2020 to 9 August 2020), Shupe was on board the research vessel Polarstern. During these periods, he led the Atmosphere team and was a member of the Communications / Outreach and Data teams.

Research Markus Rex and Matthew Shupe aboard the research icebreaker Polarstern during the MOSAiC expedition.

His research is related to understanding the role of clouds, atmospheric structure, and surface energy exchange in the melting of sea ice and ice sheets. Based on the measurements collected during the SHEBA expedition, he showed the importance and abundance of supercooled liquid clouds in the Arctic. He discovered that clouds in which the water is liquid occur in the Arctic, even though they are much colder than zero degrees Celsius. They don't freeze into ice because there are no condensation nuclei. He also contributed to the inclusion of supercooled liquid clouds in numerical climate models, which otherwise had an incorrect representation of the surface energy budget. He showed that the cloud phase (liquid, solid, and mixed) is poorly represented in Earth climate models.

Research projects and expeditions In various capacities, Shupe took part in the following projects:

1997–1998: Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean (SHEBA) Project of the National Science Foundation, Beaufort Sea north of Alaska 1999: NOAA/ETL (Environmental Technology Laboratory) Depolarisation Lidar (DABUL = Depolarization and Backscatter Unattended Lidar) in Utqiagvik, Alaska 2000: High Altitude Weather Characterization Experiment, Boston 2005–2007: SEARCH-Projekt (Study of Environmental Arctic Change), Eureka, Canada Since 2009: ICECAPS, Summit Station, Greenland 2010–2011: Storm Peak Validation Experiment (StormVex), Colorado 2014: Arctic Clouds in Summer Experiment (ACSE), Arctic Ocean 2016: ICARUS campaign, Oliktok Point, Alaska 2019–2020: Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) Expedition, Arctic Ocean