News

By Emily Case-Buskirk, NDMC Communications Specialist

Ethan Greenberg followed his love of meteorology to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Natural Resources. As a graduate of the master’s program this spring, he is now applying the skills he gained at Nexus Weather and Climate, based in Boulder, Colorado. 

He first became interested in meteorology during the 2011 Super Outbreak tornado event. Over 360 tornadoes touched down in parts of the South, Midwest, and eastern U.S. over the course of four days in April 2011. It is the largest recorded tornado outbreak on record, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Storm Data. The event caused over 300 fatalities and $10.2 billion in damages. 

“Even though I’ve spent my whole life living in California and Los Angeles in particular, there was a big tornado outbreak in the South and I was just captivated watching the tornadoes,” he said. 

Greenberg has a background in meteorology with an emphasis on data science. He earned a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric science from Cornell University with a minor in climate change. 

Numerous mentors recommended the SNR and National Drought Mitigation Center even before Greenberg started college. 

“I was aware of UNL’s prowess in the area before starting my undergrad career at Cornell,” he said. 

As he started assessing graduate programs, the SNR stood out to him for the applied nature of the program and the NDMC’s reputation. He joined the Natural Resource Sciences program with a specialization in climate assessment and impacts. 

“As I was about to graduate, I applied a bunch of different grad programs and I really did like the applied nature of UNL’s,” he said. “I liked the flexibility of it where I could take mostly meteorology classes, and expand my knowledge in areas of meteorology I wasn’t as confident in.” 

During his time in the program, Greenberg was able to expand his meteorology knowledge in areas like forecasting. He also gained experience in fundamental skills and tools used in Geographic Information Systems. 

For his thesis project, he focused on meteorological connections between drought and wildfire, particularly in the Southwestern U.S. His advisor was Mark Svoboda, NDMC director, with committee members Francisco Muñoz-Arriola and Tsegaye Tadesse, NDMC geospatial coordinator. 

His research expands on the connections between drought and wildfire, which are generally land-surface interactions. To accomplish this, he used data from the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research, as well as Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Indices and U.S. Drought Monitor maps.  

He analyzed this data with clustering algorithms to compare synoptic, or large-scale, weather patterns between seasonal drought and extreme fire weather events. Clustering algorithms are a type of machine learning analysis that generally compare similarities between data sets. 

Greenberg found similarities between weather patterns associated with drought and wildfires. These patterns are especially similar at upper levels of the atmosphere, although low-level patterns are also quite alike, he said. Drought patterns are hot and dry, especially in the Southwest, while fire patterns are hot, dry and windy. This research can serve as a building block for improving long-term drought and wildfire forecasts. 

"What I found was basically the patterns look fairly similar, and you’d expect that,” he said.  

As a graduate student, Greenberg was also a consulting meteorologist at Al Roker Entertainment. In this role, he helped develop and review meteorological content for the PBS series Weather Hunters. 

Greenberg started a new job in June working as a software engineer for Nexus Weather and Climate, a weather and climate software development company based in Boulder, Colorado. The role is remote and he is working from San Francisco.  

A convergence of serendipitous circumstances led him to land the interview. In January, he was on a flight to Houston for the American Meteorological Society’s annual meeting. This is the largest conference for professionals in the weather, water and climate community.  

Greenberg was carrying a poster in a portable tube, since he was going to present his research at the meeting. Another traveler on the plane, who was also attending AMS, noticed the poster and asked Greenberg about his project. This new acquaintance was part of a team that was working with Nexus Weather and Climate on a project. He connected Greenberg with a colleague at the organization who provided an internal referral. 

“Long story short, we talked and he was like, ‘What you're doing in your research is actually really similar to the work we do here. It's a lot of coding, working with meteorological datasets, and using the data from a meteorologist's perspective,’” he said. 

From there, Greenberg connected with the hiring team, interviewed and got the job. In this position, he is supporting weather software development for Air Force Weather mission applications.  

He is looking forward to the opportunities this new role will provide. 

“I’ve always wanted to work on the intersection of data science and meteorology, so this is kind of the perfect role for that,” he said. “And so I really do see this as a long-term goal.”