Linda Mearns


Linda Opal Mearns was an American geographer and climate scientist specializing in climate change assessment science. Mearns was a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Mearns is the director of NCAR's Weather and Climate Impacts Assessment Science Program and head of the Regional Integrated Sciences Collective. Mearns was a lead principal investigator for the North American Regional Climate Change Program.

Biography

Mearns received a Doctor of Philosophy in geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Mearns was an author on the Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Mearns was a lead principal investigator for the North American Regional Climate Change Program which uses data that Mearns was involved in generating to produce data-based climate simulations to predict future climate scenarios.

Selected publications

Books

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Journal articles

  • Giorgi, F. and Mearns, L. O. Approaches to the simulation of regional climate change: A review. 1991. Reviews of Geophysics 29, 191.
  • Bukovsky, M. S., Thompson, J. A., Mearns, L. O. Weighting a Regional Climate Model Ensemble: Does It Make a Difference? Can It Make a Difference? 2019. Climate Research 77, 23-43.
  • Mearns, L. O., Katz, R. W., and Schneider, S. H. Extreme High-Temperature Events: Changes in their probabilities with Changes in Mean Temperature. 1984. Journal of Climate and Applied Meteorology 23, 1601-1613.
  • Giorgi, F. and Mearns, L. O. 1999. Introduction to special section: Regional Climate Modeling Revisited. Journal of Geophysical Research 104, 6335-6352.
  • Easterling, D. R., Meehl, G. A., Parmesan, C., Changnon, S. A., Karl, T. R., and Mearns L. O. 2000. Climate Extremes: Observations, Modeling, and Impacts. Science 289, 2068-2074.
  • Giorgi, F. and Mearns, L. O. Calculation of Average, Uncertainty Range, and Reliability of Regional Climate Changes from AOGCM Simulations via the “Reliability Ensemble Averaging” Method. 2002. Journal of Climate 15, 1141-1158.
  • Feddema, J. J., Oleson, K. W., Bonan G. B., Mearns L. O., Buja L. E., Meehl G. A., Washington W. M. 2005. The Importance of Land-Cover Change in Simulating Future Climates. Science 310, 1674-1678.

Awards and honors