Landsea earned his doctoral degree in Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. He served as chair of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Tropical Meteorology and Tropical Cyclone. Landsea was recognized with the American Meteorological Society's Banner I. Miller award for "best contribution to the science of hurricane and tropical weather forecasting." Over the years Landsea's work has involved the general hurricane FAQ currently on the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory website and the Atlantic hurricane reanalysis. Landsea has contributed to Science, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Journal of Climate, and Nature. He has been vocal on the lack of a link between global warming and current hurricane intensity change. Landsea has published a number of research papers on cyclones and hurricanes. He is the author of Hurricanes, Typhoons, and Tropical Cyclones: FAQ. He also has been the lead scientist in the Atlantic hurricane reanalysis since 1997.
In January, 2005, Landsea withdrew from his participation in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, criticizing it for using "a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound." Landsea claimed the IPCC had become politicized and the leadership ignored his concerns. Landsea does not believe that global warming has a strong influence on hurricanes: "global warming might be enhancing hurricane winds but only by 1 percent or 2 percent". According to Salon magazine, Bush administration personnel chose Landsea over another scientist at NOAA to speak to the news media about the link between hurricanes and climate change after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. In an interview on PBS, Christopher Landsea said "we certainly see substantial warming in the ocean and atmosphere over the last several decades on the order of a degree Fahrenheit and I have no doubt a portion of that, at least, is due to greenhouse warming. The question is whether we're seeing any real increases in the hurricane activity." He went on to say "with the Atlantic hurricanes in particular, they're due to changes both in the ocean as well as the atmosphere. Just changing the ocean where it's a little bit warmer isn't sufficient." As for climate change affecting hurricane strength, Landsea said that global warming theories and numerical modeling suggest only that "hurricanes like Katrina and Rita may have been stronger due to global warming but maybe by one or two miles per hour."
Awards
2007 NOAA Administrator's Award for "establishing and administrating the Joint Hurricane Testbed, NOAA's first U.S. Weather Research Program testbed, accelerating research into operations, greatly improving forecasts."
United States Department of Commerce Bronze Medal Award for Superior Federal Service for "issuing the accurate and first official physically based Atlantic Seasonal Hurricane Outlooks for the 1998/1999 seasons, based upon new research"
American Meteorological Society's Banner I. Miller Award for the "best contribution to the science of hurricane and tropical weather forecasting published during the years 1990 - 1992."
