15th Annual Leonard Robock Lecture: Dr. Clara Deser to Speak on March 24
February 11, 2026
The UW–Madison Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences is pleased to announce Dr. Clara Deser as the 15th Annual Leonard Robock Lecture speaker. Her talk, “A Range of Outcomes: The Combined Effects of Natural and Anthropogenic Influences on Local Climate” is free and open to the public and will take place on Tuesday, March 24, from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. CT at the DeLuca Forum in the Discovery Building. A reception with refreshments and appetizers will follow the talk. Registration appreciated but not required.
Speaker Biography
Dr. Clara Deser is a Senior Scientist and former head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder CO. She has spent her career studying global climate variability and change in observations and Earth System models, with an emphasis on interactions among the atmosphere, oceans and cryosphere. Recent projects include the role of internal variability in regional climate trends, the effects of projected Arctic sea ice loss on global climate, the El Nino – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, and modes of decadal-multidecadal climate variability in the Atlantic and Pacific. She pioneered the use of Earth System Model Large Ensemble Simulations to elucidate the combined influences of natural and human-induced contributions to climate variability and trends. Deser has co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications, and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. She received her PhD in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Washington in 1989, and her BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982. She joined NCAR in 1997.
Talk Summary
Global warming is indisputable, yet disentangling its effect from natural variability on local scales is challenging. In this lecture, Dr. Clara Deser, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), will discuss the science of natural climate variability and anthropogenic climate change and how they superimpose to produce the weather we actually experience. She will also show how natural variability introduces an unavoidable range of outcomes for local and regional climate projections over the coming decades, consistent with our scientific understanding of the climate system. In addition, she will discuss related challenges for attributing climate changes in the recent past and for assessing Earth System Models.
About the Leonard Robock Lecture Series
This annual public lecture series is sponsored by the UW–Madison Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and made possible by a generous gift from the estate of Leonard Robock. The series features an expert to present on an issue related to the public interest, such as climate change, tornadoes, hurricanes, hydrothermal vents, etc. The lecture is open to the public and aims to educate attendees on the state of our knowledge on these issues.