Clear Skies Ahead: Stephanie Herring

“I think that because climate is so big as a topic area, it’s important to think about which aspect and which element of that space you want to be in. If it is on the intersection of climate and fill-in-the-blank—whether it’s climate and water, climate and public health, climate and agri­culture—then having some level of background in that intersection and where those two things are going to come together is really important. If you want to go into the more pure climate modeling type of world or just the data, I would work for a place like NOAA, for instance, and look at the data and make these incredibly high-quality NOAA gold standard climate datasets. Then your background and skill set in data science become more important drivers versus if you want to be in that applied space.”
—Stephanie Herring, chief of the Geophysical Science Branch at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information in Boulder, Colorado, on helpful skills for someone looking to be employed in the climate world. For more, listen to the Clear Skies Ahead podcast at https://blubrry.com/clear_skies_ahead/, with new episodes released every month.