Staff

• Director of Communications, Senior Research Scientist
• Email: hcullen@climatecentral.org

Dr. Heidi Cullen is a research scientist and correspondent at Climate Central. Dr. Cullen currently reports on climate for PBS NewsHour, Time.com and The Weather Channel. Before joining Climate Central, Dr. Cullen served as The Weather Channel’s first on-air climate expert and helped create Forecast Earth, the first weekly television series to focus 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, CO. 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, the American Meteorological Society and is an Associate Editor of the journal Weather, Climate, Society. In 2008, Dr. Cullen was awarded the National Conservationist Award for Science by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). She received a bachelor's degree in engineering/operations research from Columbia University and went on to receive a doctorate in climatology and ocean-atmosphere dynamics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia 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.