The NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship Program was founded in 1990 through an agreement with Dr. J. Michael Hall and the UCAR Visiting Scientist Programs office. The NOAA Climate Programs Office, headed by Chester J. Koblinsky, funds the program.
The purpose of the program is to help create and train the next generation of researchers needed for climate studies. It was anticipated that several contemporary NOAA efforts, such as TOGA and its ambitious field programs, e.g., COARE, would generate a tremendous amount of data that would require the attention of an enlarged research community here and abroad. In the larger view, it was necessary to attract some of the new PhD's to the community in order to establish the seeds of scientific leadership for the expanded programs of the future. Thus, the fellowship program attracts outstanding recent PhD's in the sciences relevant to the NOAA Climate and Global Change Program. The program supports research on climate variations with time scales of seasons to centuries.
There have been 176 appointments made to the program to date. See the Alumni listings for information on each appointment.
The NOAA C&GC program organizes a biennial Summer Institute in beautiful Steamboat Springs, Colorado as part of the fellowship program. The next institute will be July 8-13, 2012.
In April 2011, the NOAA C&GC Program celebrated it's 20th Anniversary. Participants, Schedule and Presentations are available here.