Dr. Lopez is an oceanographer at the University of Miami NOAA Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies and Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. He is currently engaged in several research projects, which aim at studying the ocean-atmosphere interaction, climate variability, the occurrence of extreme weather events, and their economic and societal impact. One of his recent studies involved assessing the relative role of anthropogenic forcing versus natural variability in the occurrence of heat wave events in the U.S. In this study, he used the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) models to identified when we might expect the climate change signal to emerge on top of naturally occurring heat waves into the 21st Century climate projections. Dr. Lopez is also leading a project on inter-hemispheric variations of the Atlantic Ocean heat transport and its significant impacts on atmospheric circulation, climate, and extreme weather. He is also a team leader for a NOAA (NGI, Northern Gulf Institute) project, which focus on developing a seasonal outlook for U.S. land falling hurricanes.
Lopez is currently a member of several research communities, such as the NOAA-OAR-CPO-MAPP CMIP6-Trask-Force Team, the US-AMOC Science team for US CLIVAR, and the NOAA MAPP Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) Prediction Task Force. He has a B.S. in Meteorology and Mathematics from Florida State University and a Ph.D. in Meteorology and Physical Oceanography from the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.
