Yvette Richardson

Yvette Richardson is an American meteorologist with substantial contributions to tornado dynamics, tornadogenesis, the environments of tornadoes, supercells, and severe convection, and radar observations of these. She was a principal investigator (PI) of VORTEX2.

Career Richardson graduated with Special Academic Honors (sigma cum laude) at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls (UWRF) with a B.S. in physics in 1990. She earned a M.S. and Ph.D. in meteorology from the University of Oklahoma (OU) in 1993 and 1999, respectively. Richardson was a visiting assistant professor at OU from 1998 to 2000, was a research scientist at OU from 2000 to 2001, and has been a professor at Pennsylvania State University (PSU) since 2002. She is a member of Sigma Pi Sigma and Phi Kappa Phi.

Richardson was on the steering committee, was a scientific-PI, and was co-coordinator of mobile mesonets for VORTEX2. She previously collaborated in other field projects, including PAMREX, (2003–2004), IHOP (2002), ROTATE (2000, 2001, 2004), and VORTEX1 (1994–1995). She co-authored the textbook, Mesoscale Meteorology in Midlatitudes, with Paul Markowski with whom she also wrote a major Weatherwise magazine article, "How to Make a Tornado". Richardson is a co-writer of a rebuttal to a New York Times opinion piece by physicist Richard A. Muller, challenging his contention that tornadic activity had decreased in the U.S. and his tying the alleged decline to global warming.