Narrative

I have long had an interest in weather and climate, which probably is related to growing up on a dairy farm in southeastern Wisconsin. I completed my B.S. in Atmospheric Science in 1982, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In addition to meteorology, I took some climatology and physical geography courses offered by the Geography Department. Those classes piqued my interest in geography, especially Donn Haglund's Arctic Winter Field Course, which that year took us to Greenland and Iceland. I decided to do graduate work in a Geography department, opting to pursue climatology rather than meteorology. I completed my graduate work in the Geography Department at the University of Delaware, receiving an M.S. in Geography in 1987 and a Ph.D. in Climatology in 1992. I joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota in January of 1992.