Matthew Shupe


Matthew David Shupe is an American mathematician, chemist, meteorologist and climatologist.

Personal life

Matthew Shupe was born in Washington state but grew up in Idaho. He attended college in Colorado. After that, he studied mathematics and chemistry with a focus on atmospheric sciences at the University of Puget Sound in Washington state. He completed his studies in 1997 with a bachelor's degree in chemistry and mathematics.
In 2006, he received a master's degree in astrophysics and atmospheric sciences from the University of Colorado Boulder.
In 2007, he received his doctorate there with a thesis on An intricate balance of liquid and ice: The properties, processes, and significance of Arctic stratiform mixed-phase clouds.
Shupe is married and has two sons.

Career

In 1996, he worked as a research assistant at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington.
From 1998 to 2004, he was a research scientist at the Environmental Technology Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Since 2004, he has been a research associate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Earth System Research Laboratory at NOAA.
From 2019 to 2020, he was a co-leader of the MOSAiC Expedition together with Klaus Dethloff and expedition leader Markus Rex.
In leg 1 of MOSAiC and leg 4, Shupe was on board the research vessel Polarstern. During these periods, he led the Atmosphere team and was a member of the Communications / Outreach and Data teams.

Research

His research is related to understanding the role of clouds, atmospheric structure, and surface energy exchange in the melting of sea ice and ice sheets. Based on the measurements collected during the SHEBA expedition, he showed the importance and abundance of supercooled liquid clouds in the Arctic. He discovered that clouds in which the water is liquid occur in the Arctic, even though they are much colder than zero degrees Celsius. They don't freeze into ice because there are no condensation nuclei. He also contributed to the inclusion of supercooled liquid clouds in numerical climate models, which otherwise had an incorrect representation of the surface energy budget. He showed that the cloud phase is poorly represented in Earth climate models.

Research projects and expeditions

In various capacities, Shupe took part in the following projects: