Sarah White, UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow

I'm a paleoceanographer and paleoclimatologist working to address gaps in our understanding of modern and future climate. I am particularly interested in how climate variability and hydroclimate respond to changes in mean climate and external forcing. Hydroclimate and variability (including extreme events) have a greater impact on human lives than slow changes in average temperature, but are much less well understood. To study climates outside the modern range of observations, I develop test cases over geologic time, by collecting new geochemical proxy data from marine sediments as well as synthesizing terrestrial climate proxy data and historical observations of weather and hydroclimate (in collaboration with historians). I also develop new statistical approaches to model uncertainty in paleoclimate data, enabling quantification of variability and extreme events.