Claudia Tebaldi

Claudia Tebaldi is an Italian American statistician who is a climate change researcher at the Joint Global [Change Research Institute]. Her research evaluates extreme climate events. With her mentor, Jerry Meehl, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, she published one of the first papers looking at changes in extremes because of human-made warming. The paper, from 2004, predicted that global warming would bring more intense, frequent and longer lasting heat waves. She was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2023.

Early life and education

Tebaldi grew up in Italy. She studied economics at the Università Bocconi and completed her doctoral studies in statistics at Duke University. Her doctorate involved a Bayesian analysis of network flow problems. She was interested in her applying her statistics to a real world problem, and she moved to the National Center for Atmospheric Research as a postdoctoral fellow in the Geophysical Statistics Project. Her early work studied clean-air turbulence for aviation safety.

Tebaldi uses statistical analysis to better understand climate change. She is a researcher in the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory – University of Maryland Joint [Global Change Research Institute]. In the last years, her research considers impacts of climate change on the human system, including economy, agriculture, water resources.
Tebaldi modelled the impact of sea level rise on storm surges along the coasts of the United States. Her research predicted substantial changes in the frequency of extreme water levels, even in areas with low sea level rise. She went on to study extreme sea levels in various climate scenarios, and found that extreme sea levels would become more common all around the world.
Tebaldi was a lead author for two of the latest reports of the international body for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.