Bette Otto-Bliesner is a Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, Deputy Director of the NCAR Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory, and serves as head of NCAR’s Paleoclimate Modeling Program.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, Otto-Bliesner first became interested in Meteorology as a child watching P.J. Hoff, the CBS affiliate weatherman. She earned her doctorate in Meteorology in 1980 at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Shortly after, she redirected her focus from modeling present climate to modeling past climates, starting with her pioneering work with John Kutzbach on orbital forcing of the African-Asian monsoon during the Holocene. She joined NCAR in 1995, coming from a faculty position in the Geology Department at the University of Texas at Arlington.
As a nationally and internationally recognized expert in using computer-based models of Earth’s climate system to investigate past climate change and climate variability across a wide range of time scales, she has been involved in the IPCC Working Group I reports since the Third Assessment and was a Lead Author for the IPCC AR4 and AR5. She served as the Chair of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) Past Global Changes (PAGES) and is currently Co-chair of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) Paleoclimate Working Group. She is a member of the Scientific Steering Committee for the Paleoclimate Modeling Intercomparison Project (PMIP), the group that coordinates international climate model experiments addressing past climate change relevant to understanding future change.
Role: Senior Scientist | Deputy Director of the NCAR Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory
Field of Research: Meteorology and paleoclimate research.