A FORCE FOR ARCTIC SCIENCE
Dr. Jennifer Francis joins WHRC by Dave McGlinchey
off of the glaciers. That first night was probably the scariest part of our entire trip.”
They were forced to retreat, turning back to Iceland and eventually re-routing directly south. The detour added 6,000 miles to their trip, but Francis was hooked by the idea of better understanding weather patterns.
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efore Dr. Jennifer Francis was a world-renowned atmospheric scientist. Before she pioneered the idea that a rapidly warming Arctic affects weather at lower latitudes. Before she became the go-to quote for journalists covering extreme weather in the age of climate change. Before she became the newest senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. Before any of that, Jen Francis sailed to the Arctic.
In the early 1980s, Francis took a break from her undergraduate studies and took five years to sail a 45-foot sloop around the world with her husband. “As part of that we went up to the Arctic. This was pre-GPS. This was pre-cell phones. It was before you could get good weather information,” Francis said. “We went up to Svalbard (Norway), and the weather information we could find was basically useless.” The couple sailed from Norway to Iceland, and then planned to continue on to Greenland and down the coast of North America to Massachusetts. When they left Iceland it was midSeptember, with 12 hours of daily darkness. “Immediately we started seeing icebergs, which was unexpected and bad,” Francis said. “Not small icebergs, the size of houses. It had been a really warm, early summer in eastern Greenland. So a lot more ice than normal had broken 8
Canopy
Winter 2019
Back on land, she returned to school at San Jose State University where she earned a bachelors degree in meteorology. She decided that she wanted to focus on research, not forecasting, and got her Ph.D from the University of Washington. “I’ve been studying the Arctic my entire career, really starting as an undergad,” Francis said. “It goes back to when my husband and I sailed up the Arctic in 1984. I knew then what I wanted when I went back to school.”
Now, more than three decades later, her research is focused on unseasonably warm weather and the resulting impacts. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, and Francis has zeroed in on the connection between that warming, and weather changes in mid-latitudes. The crux of her work is that a warmer Arctic disrupts the flow of air from lower latitudes toward the poles. That disruption, in turn, has disrupted and redirected the jet stream. She joined the Woods Hole Research Center from Rutgers University’s Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences in September to continue this research.
“I feel like we are just scratching the surface of how a rapidly warming Arctic is affecting weather patterns at mid-latitudes. There is a lot more work to do,” Francis said. “That’s really where I plan to focus, with the ultimate goal of knowing what to expect in the future, in the next decade to four decades. That’s really the window where policymakers need to think about decisions they have to make. Decisions about infrastructure. Really expensive decisions that have to be made and they
