Jason E. Smerdon

Jason E. Smerdon is a Professor of Climate within the Columbia Climate School. He also holds appointments as Co-Senior Director for Education and Co-Director of the Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development.  He teaches courses on climate, environmental change and sustainable development to undergraduate and graduate students.  Smerdon also lectures widely in public and private settings on the subject of climate change and its social dimensions.  

Smerdon’s research focuses on climate variability and change during the past several millennia and how past climates can help us understand future climate change. He publishes widely in the scientific literature on paleoclimate reconstruction techniques, the dynamics of past climate change and variability, and on assessing climate model simulations of the past and future using paleoclimatic information.  In 2013, Smerdon served as a Contributing Author to Assessment Report Five (WG1) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  He is co-author (with Ed Mathez) of the textbook Climate Change: The Science of Global Warming and Our Energy Future (Columbia University Press, September 2018).

Smerdon received his B.A. from Gustavus Adolphus College with a major in physics, and his M.S. in physics and Ph.D. in applied physics from the University of Michigan.

Common-Era Paleoclimatology, Climate Modeling, Hydroclimate, Climate Variability and Change

• Ph.D., Applied Physics, University of Michigan, 2004
• M.S., Physics, University of Michigan, 2000
• B.A., Physics Major, Gustavus Adolphus College, 1998

• Primary Discipline: Paleoclimate
• Secondary Discipline: Modern and Future Climate
• Other Disciplines: Atmospheric Science

• Co-Senior Director for Education, Columbia Climate School
• Co-Director of the Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development, Columbia Climate School
• Text Book: Climate Change: The Science of Global Warming and Our Energy Future