Episode 6: Sarah Kapnick

Deep Convection

Sarah Kapnick’s journey in the climate world has not been a conventional one. Starting as a “math nerd in the Midwest”, her path meandered through investment banking, back to academia for a PhD., and now to one of the most influential positions in US climate science and policy – Chief Scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Sarah’s initial foray into the world of finance might seem unorthodox for a climate scientist, but in reality, it was a preview of the broader understanding she would bring to the field. At Goldman Sachs, she learned how to structure catastrophe bonds, a financial instrument intrinsically linked to climate-related events such as hurricanes. Sarah realized that accurately quantifying the risk of such events requires an understanding of how their probabilities of occurring in the present-day climate may differ from their historically observed occurrence probabilities. So, she decided to go back to academia and become an expert in this field.

She first went to UCLA to do a PhD and then on to NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton. Here, Sarah was at the forefront of developing climate models, forecasting climate patterns from mere months to many decades into the future. At the same time, she kept doing some research at the intersection of climate and economics. After her decade-long stint at GFDL she went back to another bank, before getting recruited to be NOAA Chief Scientist.

What distinguishes Sarah beyond her scientific credentials is her ability to bridge disparate worlds, and to merge science, finance, and leadership. Her return to NOAA as Chief Scientist comes at a pivotal moment. With climate changes already upon us, the need for informed, integrated action has never been more pressing – and Sarah is a great person to drive the transition from identifying climate problems to actively developing solutions. She emphasizes the interdependence of user-driven and basic science in making that transition happen:

“We still need our basic research, but we also need to transform, because if we are going to deal with the manifestations of climate change, which are going to continue happening and continue to get worse and continue to evolve in the coming years and decades until emissions reach zero, we need to prepare and know what to do. And so the science needs to continue, needs to be fundamental because that drives the [creation of] models that can actually do things that are actionable.”

The interviews with Sarah Kapnick were recorded in March 2023. Image credit: NOAA/GFDL

• Sarah’s website at NOAA