Claire L. Parkinson

Claire L. Parkinson has been a climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center since July 1978 and a Senior Fellow at Goddard since 2005. Her research emphasis has been on polar sea ice and its connections to the rest of the climate system and to climate change, with a particular emphasis on satellite remote sensing. This work has involved satellite data set generation and analysis, including the determination of decreases in Arctic sea ice coverage since the 1970s and examination of their regional variabilities and impacts, plus the quantification and analysis of the very different time series of sea ice changes in the Antarctic. Claire has also developed a computer model of sea ice, has done field work in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, and is the lead author of an atlas of Arctic sea ice from satellite data and a coauthor of two other sea ice atlases.