Brian Etherton is a meteorologist who has worked extensively on climate modeling. He is currently a Principal Scientist at Vaisala, a Finnish company that provides environmental and industrial measurement solutions, where he leads the climate modeling team. Prior to joining Vaisala, he worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from 2011 to 2017, where he was a Research Meteorologist and led the development of new climate models for the United States. Etherton has also served as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and has published numerous scientific papers on topics such as climate change projections, extreme weather events, and climate model evaluation. He holds a Ph.D. in atmospheric science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in meteorology from Penn State University.

Scope and Content Note
Etherton explains how, while growing up near Seattle, he wanted to know when the weather would be nice enough for him to play outside.  At Penn State, he had several mentors, including Craig Bishop and Sharan Majumdar.  Etherton changed career paths as an adult, and one of his professors, Alison Bridger at San Jose State University, suggested that Etherton attend Penn State for a Ph.D. while he was working as a software engineer for Lockheed Martin.  He talks about his appreciation for the community, his involvement with volunteer activities and his time as an editor of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAM).  Etherton describes how his first job, a postdoctoral position at the University of Miami, allowed him a certain independence and the opportunity to make choices and “do” meteorology as opposed to just studying it.  Other topics discussed include how to prepare for the future with meteorologists from different generations and his role in different groups: Probability and Statistics, High-Performance Computing and Annual Meeting Oversight Committee (AMOC).