Rate My Professor Arianna Varuolo-Clarke

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.