Art DeGaetano received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. focusing on Climatology and Horticulture from Rutgers University in 1989. He was an assistant professor in the Department of Meteorology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, South Dakota until 2001. Art began his career at Cornell in 2001 as a research climatologist in the federally-supported Northeast Regional Climate Center (NRCC) on Cornell's main campus. He is currently a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and Director of the NRCC. The mission of the NRCC is to enhance the use and dissemination of climate information to a wide variety of sectors in the Northeast. Art serves as an editor for the American Meteorological Society Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology.
Applied climatology which involves the development of methods and data sets that provide climatological information to decision-makers in a variety of fields. Four more specific research areas make up this general focus: modeling climate influences on man-made and biological systems, documenting observed variations in the climate system, improving climate data quality, and assessing climate impacts.
Foremost is Dr. DeGaetano's contribution to a nationally recognized undergraduate atmospheric science program. DeGaetano teaches a course on global warming as well as two required undergraduate courses: Atmospheric Thermodynamics and Hydrostatics, and Physical Meteorology.
Outreach through the Northeast Regional Climate Center (NRCC). The NRCC is one of six federal centers that disseminates climate data, data products and decision tools to regional stakeholders and is on the forefront of developing online data dissemination systems that are in use nationally. Increasingly, these systems are being tailored to address issues related to climate change adaptation.
ASHS Outstanding Extension Publication Award (American Society for Horticultural Science) 2018
