Lisa Goddard

Lisa Marie Goddard (September 23, 1966 – January 13, 2022) was a climate scientist and former director at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI). She joined the institute in 1995 and served as IRI’s director from 2012-2020. She also held an adjunct Associate Professor appointment at Columbia University.

Her research focus was on forecasting methodology, seasonal climate forecasting and verification, climate change projections and especially on the extraction of meaningful information from climate models and available observations. She was involved in several activities of the World Climate Research Programme and acted as co-chair in CLIVAR from 2013 to 2015.

Biography

Lisa Goddard graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in physics in 1988. She received a PhD in atmospheric and oceanic sciences at Princeton in 1995 under George Philander. She joined IRI as a postdoctoral fellow immediately following her PhD, and spent her entire career there, eventually rising to the Director of the IRI, which position she held from 2012 to 2020.

She began her career at a time when the importance of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation to seasonal weather patterns was just beginning to be understood. The focus of her research would become weather forecasting on seasonal to decadal scales. She sought to provide people with near-term information about weather hazards such as droughts, heat-waves, floods. During the course of her career she collaborated with governments and non-profits in dozens of countries to provide useful short-term forecasts for agriculture, public health, emergency planning and energy production.

Goddard held a number of influential positions during her career. From 2009 to 2017, she was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Board of Atmospheric Science and Climate. She co-chaired World Climate Research Programme's CLIVAR project from 2013 to 2015.

She married David Cooperberg and had two sons. She died in 2022 at the age of 55 due to breast cancer.

Selected publications

During her career, she contributed to more than 100 research articles. Many of her most prominent works were related to the use of weather models to forecast on seasonal to decadal scales, including:

• Gerald A Meehl; Lisa Goddard; James Murphy; Ronald J Stouffer; George Boer; et al. (October 2009). "Decadal prediction: Can it be skillful?". Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
• Lisa Goddard; Simon J Mason; Stephen E Zebiak; Chester F Ropelewski; Reid Basher; Mark A Cane (August 2001). "Current approaches to seasonal to interannual climate predictions". International Journal of Climatology.
• Gerald A Meehl; Lisa Goddard; George Boer; Robert Burgman; Grant Branstator; et al. (February 2014). "Decadal climate prediction: an update from the trenches". Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
• Lisa Goddard; A Kumar; A Solomon; D Smith; G Boer; et al. (August 2012). "A verification framework for interannual-to-decadal predictions experiments" (PDF). Climate Dynamics.