Leadership

• VP for External Communications and Chief Climatologist
• Email: hcullen@climatecentral.org

In addition to her responsibilities as VP for External Communications and Chief Climatologist, Dr. Heidi Cullen serves as a research scientist and correspondent for Climate Central. Before joining Climate Central, where she reports on climate and energy issues for programs like PBS NewsHour, Dr. Cullen served as The Weather Channel’s first on-air climate expert and helped create Forecast Earth, a weekly television series focused on issues related to climate change and the environment. Prior to that, Dr. Cullen worked as a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. She received the NOAA Climate & Global Change Fellowship and spent two years at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society working to apply long-range climate forecasts to the water resources sector in Brazil and Paraguay. She is a member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, and is an Associate Editor of the journal Weather, Climate, Society. Dr. Cullen also serves as a member of the NOAA Science Advisory Board. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Columbia University and went on to receive a Ph.D. in climatology and ocean-atmosphere dynamics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Dr. Cullen is the author of The Weather of the Future, published in August of 2010 by Harper Collins, and is a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University.

Publications

• M. Barlow, M. Wheeler, B. Lyon, and H. Cullen, 2005: Modulation of Daily Precipitation Over Southwest Asia by the Madden-Julian Oscillation, Monthly Weather Review, 133, 3579-3594.
• M.H. Glantz and H. Cullen, 2003: Zimbabwe's Food Crisis. Environment, 45(1), 9-11.
• M. Barlow, H. Cullen, B. Lyons, 2002: Drought in Central and Southwest Asia: La Nina, the warm pool, and Indian Ocean precipitation. J. Clim., 15(7): 697-700.
• M. Visbeck, J. Hurrell, L. Polvani, and H.M. Cullen, 2001: The North Atlantic Oscillation: Past, present, and future. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 98: 12876-12877.
• H.M. Cullen, P.B. deMenocal, 2000: North Atlantic Influence on Tigris-Euphrates Streamflow, Int. J. Clim., 20(8): 853-863.
• H.M. Cullen, P.B. deMenocal, 2000: The Possible Role of Climate in the collapse of the Akkadian Empire: evidence from the deep sea. Geology, 28(4): 379-382.
• H.M. Cullen, R.D. D'Arrigo, E.R. Cook and M.E. Mann, 2000: Multiproxy Reconstructions of the North Atlantic Oscillation, Paleoceanography, 16(1): 27-39.
• M. Visbeck, H. Cullen, G. Krahmann, and N. Naik. 1998. An ocean model's response to North Atlantic Oscillation-like wind forcing, Geophys. Res. Lett.., 25(24): 4521-4525.
• G. Bond, W. Showers, M. Cheseby, R. Lotti, P. Almasi, P. deMenocal, P. Priore, H. Cullen, I. Hajdas, G. Bonani. 1997. A pervasive millennial-scale cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and glacial climates, Science, 278: 1257-1266.