Bio
Michael is a Research Software Engineer with the Computational Earth Sciences Group and Climate Change Science Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. His background is in atmospheric and climate sciences, with a B.S. in Meteorology from the State University of New York at Oswego, and M.S. and PhD from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. Previously, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.
Michael currently contributes to the E3SM project, working on climate reproducibility testing, which ensures that changes to the model code base do not change the model's simulated climate unless intended. He also contributes to the TRITON inundation modeling effort, an open source flooding model, and the reservoir GHG project, providing software engineering support to both projects.
Previously at ORNL he has been involved in the ProbSLR effort to improve land ice models, working on the validation and verification. This involves nightly testing, as well as the comparison of model runs to observational data, using software in the Land Ice Verification and Validation Toolkit (LIVVkit).
His post-doctoral and PhD research research focused on the links between tropospheric and stratospheric weather and climate. His dissertation was titled "Investigating the Link Between Sudden Stratospheric Warming and Tropospheric Blocking in the Northern Hemisphere", and has recently worked on the interaction between sea ice and mid-latitude circulation via stratospheric pathways.