Rate My Professor Arianna Varuolo-Clarke

Arianna Varuolo-Clarke is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Dartmouth College. She earned her Ph.D. in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Columbia University in 2023, with a dissertation examining the mystery of observed and simulated precipitation trends in southeastern South America since the early 20th century, co-advised by Jason E. Smerdon and A. Park Williams. She previously obtained an M.S. in Atmospheric Sciences from Stony Brook University in 2018, where her thesis investigated topographic influences on the North American monsoon under advisor Kevin A. Reed, and a B.S. in Atmospheric Science from Vermont State University (formerly Lyndon State College) in 2016. Prior to her faculty position at Dartmouth, which she joined in 2025, Varuolo-Clarke served as a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder from September 2023 to 2025, mentored by Jennifer E. Kay. Her earlier roles included graduate research assistantships at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University.

Varuolo-Clarke's research focuses on how the distribution of water will change with climate change, addressing key questions about the influence of anthropogenic forcing, natural internal climate variability, and their combined effects on hydroclimate variability and change. She employs observations and climate models to discern drivers of past hydroclimate shifts and constrain projections of future water availability, with particular attention to regions like southeastern South America, the North American monsoon, western United States, and the South American Altiplano. She has received the CFMIP Early Career Award in 2024, the NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2023-2025, Columbia University Provost’s Diversity Fellowship from 2018-2023, and several other honors including the Stony Brook Dean’s Scholarship and LSC Alumni Outstanding Senior Award. Her key publications include "Megadroughts in the Common Era and the Anthropocene" (Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 2022), "Growing impact of wildfire on western United States water supply" (PNAS, 2022), "ENSO-driven coupled megadroughts in North and South America over the last millennium" (Nature Geoscience, 2021), "Gross discrepancies between observed and simulated twentieth-to-twenty-first-century precipitation trends in southeastern South America" (Journal of Climate, 2021), "Influence of the South American low-level jet on the austral summer precipitation trend in southeastern South America" (Geophysical Research Letters, 2022), and "A 300-year tree-ring δ¹⁸O-based precipitation reconstruction for the South American Altiplano highlights decadal hydroclimate teleconnections" (Communications Earth & Environment, 2024). Her work has garnered over 500 citations, contributing significantly to understanding precipitation variability and its projections.