Caroline C. Ummenhofer

Ummenhofer was born in Freiburg, Germany.[3] In 2003, she graduated with a bachelor's degree in science from University of Wales, Bangor, UK, where she earned Joint Honours in Physical Oceanography and Marine Biology.[3] Ummenhofer received her PhD in Applied Mathematics at The University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia.[3] Ummenhofer wrote her thesis on the "Southern Hemisphere Regional Precipitation and Climate Variability: Extremes, Trends and Predictability,"[4] which won the Uwe Radok Award by the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society in the category of atmosphere/ocean/climate science.[1]

Ummenhofer was a Postdoctoral Fellow of Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems.[1] She was a Vice-Chancellor Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.[1] Then Ummenhofer was a visiting fellow at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation Marine and Atmospheric Research in Hobart.[1] Ummenhofer began working at WHOI in 2012.[3]

Ummenhofer teamed up with Timothy Walker, a history professor at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Abigail Field, a history major, to collect climate data from log books from whaling ships in the 18th and 19th century.[1] Around 5,000 whaling ship logs are kept in Southern New England due to the bustling whaling ports in New Bedford and Nantucket, which are home to the New Bedford Whaling Museum and Nantucket Whaling Museum respectively.[5] Mean global temperature records begin around 1880,[6] and many developing countries by the Indian Ocean only have reliable meteorology starting in the 1970s.[5] Whaling logbooks hold daily accounts of vessel direction(s), landmarks, latitude/longitude, storm(s), precipitation, cloud direction, wind speed, wind direction, and temperature proxies.[7][5] Temperature proxies include accounts of the tar used on the deck melting or fresh water on the ship freezing.[5] Ummenhofer and Walker must cross check around 650 log books from similar areas to come up with a 8-9 points of data, which they put into the University's database.[5] Whaling vessels are especially important to Ummenhofer work in the Indian Ocean because these ships sailed outside of established trade routes, and into more remote areas such as the Indian Ocean and Arctic Ocean.[7] With these much older records, climate scientists like Ummenhofer may create better computer models to research the effects of climate change on vulnerable areas like the Indian Ocean.[7]

• Uwe Radok Award by the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (2008)[3]
• Humboldt Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bonn, Germany (2014)[3]
• James B. Macelwane Medal by the American Geophysical Union (2018)[2]

• Ummenhofer Labs