Topic: Climatology

Keah Schuenemann, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Her areas of expertise include climate change, Greenland, climate, sea ice, and weather. She teaches Dynamic Meteorology, Synoptic Meteorology, Global Climate Change, and Physics and Chemistry for Elementary Education Majors.

Schuenemann has taught at MSU Denver since 2010 and is the director of the General Studies program. She has co-authored several papers, including “Synoptic Forcing of Precipitation Over Greenland: Climatology for 1961–99” and “Changes in Synoptic Weather Patterns and Greenland Precipitation in the 20th and 21st Centuries.” Schuenemann studies the large-scale weather around the Greenland Ice Sheet, the effects of recent climate changes on these weather patterns, and the state of the ice sheet and its contribution to sea-level rise.

More recently, she began studying how Arctic sea-ice extent affects midlatitude weather patterns, which are potentially responsible for recent droughts and cold-air outbreaks. Schuenemann is also interested in the topic of communicating climate change, the misconceptions about climate change, and developing a pedagogy on teaching climate change based on current communicating of climate-change research. She is passionate about promoting science literacy and critical thinking in the sciences.

Schuenemann received her doctorate and her master’s in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2008 and 2006, respectively, and a bachelor’s in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science from the University of Wisconsin in 2004.