CW3E Welcomes Emily Slinskey
October 12, 2023
Dr. Emily Slinskey joined CW3E as a Precipitation Scientist in October 2023. Emily earned her B.S. (2013) in Geography at SUNY Geneseo, M.S. (2018) in Geography at Portland State University, and Ph.D. (2021) in the Earth, Environment, and Society program at Portland State University.
As a graduate student at the Portland State Climate Science Lab, under the direction of Dr. Paul Loikith and in collaboration with the Regional Climate Model Evaluation System (RCMES) group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Emily applied an extreme precipitation categorization scheme as a target for a dataset intercomparison over the contiguous United States (CONUS). This work further motivated her doctoral research identifying and characterizing ARs and associated precipitation over the seven USNational Climate Assessment (NCA) regions involving an observational analysis, climate model evaluation, and assessment of change under warming. During this time, Emily also contributed to the Forecast Informed Reservoir Operations (FIRO) effort ledby CW3E and the US Army Corps of Engineers. Her research involved the development and application of an approach to quantify the contribution of non-orographic lift during AR-driven precipitation along the US West Coast.
More recently, Emily completed a postdoc at the UCLA Center for Climate Science under the supervision of Dr. Alex Hall. Supported by the HyperFACETS effort, she developed and applied a statistical framework for quantifying temporal clustering amongARs across the Western US. Following a thorough investigation of the climatological characteristics of clustered ARs, she linked these events to the occurrence and distribution of precipitation using a dynamically downscaled reanalysis product driven by a regional climate model.
At CW3E, Emily will contribute to AR research and operations partnerships to gain an improved process-based understanding of extreme hydrometeorological events and associated impacts to support their predictability over the Western US and beyond.