Graham Feingold

Graham Feingold is a NOAA Research Scientist at the Chemical Sciences Laboratory within the Earth System Research Laboratories in Boulder, Colorado, and a CIRES (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences) Fellow affiliated with the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on aerosol-cloud-precipitation interactions and their implications for climate change, utilizing high-resolution models and observational data from aircraft and surface remote sensing systems.

Dr. Feingold's research interests center on process-level studies of shallow clouds and how they're modified by particulate matter (aerosols), particularly examining the cloud feedback problem in a warming climate. His work investigates emergence and self-organization in cloud fields, aerosol effects on precipitation, and the importance of small cumulus clouds for climate. His research spans aerosol-cloud-precipitation interactions, climate feedback mechanisms, atmospheric remote sensing, and cloud microphysics, with particular emphasis on marine stratocumulus and shallow cumulus cloud systems.

His most recent publications reveal a strong focus on cloud water adjustments to aerosol perturbations, mesoscale organization of trade wind cumulus clouds, radiative effects in the vicinity of clouds, and causal relationships in aerosol-cloud interactions. The research demonstrates increasingly sophisticated approaches combining observational data, high-resolution modeling, and advanced analytical techniques like wavelet phase coherence analysis to understand complex cloud-aerosol-climate relationships.

• NOAA Environmental Technology Laboratory Award for Innovative Research (1998)
• NOAA Office of Atmospheric Research Outstanding Paper Award (2002)
• NOAA Administrator's Award (2003, 2008)
• American Geophysical Union Fellow (2013)
• NOAA Bronze Medal Award for Atlantic Trade-wind Ocean-atmosphere Mesoscale Interaction Campaign (2022)
• Wageningen Institute Visiting Fellowship (2018)

Dr. Feingold has served as a lead author for the IPCC AR5 Chapter 7 (Clouds and Aerosols) and currently serves on the Aerosol-Cloud-Precipitation-Climate (ACPC) steering committee and NASA's Aerosol and Cloud-Convection-and-Precipitation (A-CCP) Scientific Community Cohort Advisory Group. His research group develops and applies the TAU Cloud Microphysical Code using the Method of Moments, which has been implemented in various atmospheric models including RAMS, UKMO LEM, and WRF. His current work increasingly addresses the potential impacts and scientific underpinnings of marine cloud brightening as a climate intervention strategy.