Vecchi elected 2024 Fellow of the American Meteorological Society
Gabriel Vecchi, professor of geosciences and director of Princeton University’s High Meadows Environmental Institute, has been selected as an American Meteorological Society (AMS) Fellow for his work in climate science and understanding extreme weather events. He will be recognized at the 104th AMS Annual Meeting held January 28 to February 1 of next year in Baltimore, Maryland.
“Working to understand climate and its impacts has been incredibly rewarding, and I feel fortunate to have had such wonderful colleagues with whom to collaborate,” said Vecchi. “Being recognized as a Fellow by the American Meteorological Society is so meaningful to me, since the AMS is a paragon of meteorology, climate and oceanography in the US, with an intense focus on both the science, and its meaning to and impact on society.”
The AMS Fellows Program has been recognizing outstanding careers in the water, weather and climate community since 1966, and selects Fellows annually. Those eligible for election, according to AMS, “have made outstanding contributions to the atmospheric or related oceanic or hydrologic sciences or their applications during a substantial period of years.”
Vecchi has long been recognized as an expert in climate science, and his research expertise ranges over a wide array of topics including understanding short- and long-term changes to the oceans and atmosphere, including the monsoons, El Niño and the impact of climate on tropical cyclones, extreme weather and global patterns of rainfall and drought. He has also conducted research on the mechanisms of precipitation variability and change and ocean-atmosphere interaction. His work has been featured in a variety of media outlets, including the Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, Scientific American, the NBC Today Show and the BBC World News. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications.
At Princeton, Vecchi heads the Vecchi Research Group. Researchers from this lab have investigated topics such as climate impacts from volcanic eruptions, the role of climate change in creating and prolonging heat waves, global patterns of rainfall and drought, tropical cyclone variability over the last millennium, and the impact of climate on tropical diseases, among others.
Vecchi received his B.A. in mathematics from Rutgers University in 1994 and his M.S. in applied mathematics from the University of Washington. He continued his graduate studies at the University of Washington, receiving his Ph.D. in physical oceanography in 2000. Prior to coming to Princeton in 2017, Vecchi was a research oceanographer and the head of the Climate Variations and Predictability Group at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). He was appointed director of the High Meadows Environmental Institute in 2021.
Vecchi belongs to several scientific committees, including NOAA’s Climate Observing Systems Council, the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Earth System Model Scientific Steering Committee, and the U.S. National Committee for Geodesy and Geophysics at the National Academy of Sciences. He was also a lead author in Working Group I of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.
Vecchi is also the deputy director at the Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System (CIMES), which is a collaboration between Princeton University and NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.