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Christopher Landsea, Ph.D.
Special Assistant to the Director NOAA’s Ocean Prediction Center
Christopher W. Landsea, Ph.D., is serving as the special assistant to the Director of NOAA’s Ocean Prediction Center in College Park, Md. until May 2022. His role includes advancing some Marine Program initiatives such as full-basin grids, AWIP2 transition, and Warning Polygons. At the end of that assignment, he will return to his position as the chief of the Tropical Analysis and Forecast Branch (TAFB) at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami. The branch generates wind and wave forecasts for the Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, tropical North Atlantic Ocean, and tropical northeastern Pacific Ocean. The TAFB supports the Hurricane Specialist Unit at NHC by providing tropical cyclone position and intensity estimates based on the Dvorak technique.
Dr. Landsea received his Bachelor's Degree in Atmospheric Science from the University of California Los Angeles (1987) and his Master's Degree and Doctorate in Atmospheric Science from Colorado State University (1991, 1994). His graduate work was undertaken with Dr. Bill Gray, one of the world's leading experts on hurricanes and tropical meteorology. Dr. Landsea's main expertise is in seasonal forecasting of hurricanes, in hurricane climate variability and change, and in testing applied research projects for possible use in weather forecasting. He currently is leading up a re-analysis of the Atlantic hurricane database. 1992's Hurricane Andrew was officially upgraded to a Category 5 hurricane at landfall in southeastern Florida as part of this project.
While a Research Meteorologist at the Hurricane Research Division (HRD) from 1995 through 2005, Landsea participated in the HRD Hurricane Field Program by flying in the NOAA Orion P-3 aircraft into and in the NOAA Gulfstream IV jet around 15 Atlantic hurricanes (including Gilbert, Opal, Georges, Charley, Jeanne, Ivan, and Katrina) for research and forecasting purposes. He served as the Science and Operations Officer at NHC from 2005 to 2018. He has published more than 60 peer reviewed articles in the journals Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Climatic Change, EOS, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate, Journal of Insurance Regulation, Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, Monthly Weather Review, Natural Hazards Review, Nature, Nature Geoscience, Science, Tell us Weather, Weather and Forecasting, and several book chapters.
Dr. Landsea is a member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the National Weather Association and the American Geophysical Union. He served as the Chair of the AMS Committee on Tropical Meteorology and Tropical Cyclones for the years 2000-2002. Dr. Landsea was the recipient of the AMS's Max A. Eaton Prize for the Best Student Paper given at the 19th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology in May 1991 and was co-recipient of the AMS's Banner I. Miller Award given for the best contribution to the science of hurricane and tropical weather forecasting at the May 1993 meeting of the 20th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology.
Dr. Landsea is the 2000 co-recipient of a U.S. Department of Commerce Bronze Medal "for issuing the accurate and first official physically-based Atlantic seasonal hurricane outlooks for the 1998/1999 seasons, based upon new research; the 2002 AMS' Editor’s Award for reviews for the journal Weather and Forecasting; the 2009 co-recipient of the National Hurricane Conference’s Outstanding Achievement Award for Meteorology for development of the Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook product at NHC; and the 2011 co-recipient of a Department of Commerce Gold Medal “for excellence in research and data stewardship leading to a more confident assessment of the influence of human-induced climate change on hurricanes”. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society as its subject matter editor in tropical meteorology.