Ralph J. and Carol M. Cicerone Professor, Earth System Science
School of Physical Sciences

Climate-carbon cycle feedbacks, fires, land cover change, remote sensing, tropical deforestation, global change in arctic and boreal ecosystems, terrestrial ecosystems and climate policy

Randerson Lab Home Page

2017 Piers J. Sellers Global Environmental Change Mid-Career Award, American Geophysical Union
2017 Elected to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States
2019 Highly Cited Researcher, Ecology and the Environment and Geosciences, ISI Thompson Reuters
2014-2016, 2018 Highly Cited Researcher, Geosciences, ISI Thompson Reuters
2014 NASA Group Achievement Award
2008 Oceanic and Atmospheric Research Outstanding Paper Award, NOAA
2005 Macelwane Medal, American Geophysical Union
2005 Fellow, American Geophysical Union (awarded with Macelwane Medal)
2005, 2002 Editor’s Citation for Excellence in Refereeing for Global Biogeochemical Cycles, AGU
1998 Alexander Hollaender Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow, DOE
1994 Earth System Science Graduate Fellowship, NASA
1987 John D. Isaacs Marine Fellowship. Awarded by California Sea Grant.

7/13 - 6/17 Chancellor's Professor of Earth System Science, UC Irvine
7/03 - 6/13 Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor of Earth System Science, UC Irvine
3/00 - 6/03 Assistant Professor, Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, Caltech
9/98 - 2/00 Postdoctoral scholar at U.C. Berkeley and University of Alaska

Randerson studies the global carbon cycle using remote sensing and in-situ measurements and different types of models. Current research themes in his laboratory include climate-carbon cycle feedbacks, land use change, and the effects of fire on ecosystem function and atmospheric composition. He has conducted field work in Alaska and Siberia to assess the long-term impacts of fire on surface energy exchange and fluxes of carbon dioxide. Randerson was born in Fairfax, Virginia and grew up in San Diego, California, where he attended Point Loma High School. He received a BS in chemistry (1992) and a PhD in biological sciences (1998) from Stanford University. He conducted postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley and University of Alaska before joining the faculty at Caltech. In 2003, Randerson moved to UC Irvine where he now holds the position of Ralph J. and Carol M. Cicerone Professor of Earth System Science. Randerson was the recipient of the James B. Macelwane Medal in 2005 and the Piers J. Sellers Global Environmental Change Mid-Career Award in 2017 from the American Geophysical Union. Randerson served as co-chair of the biogeochemistry working group of the Community Earth System Model from 2003-2017 and is currently a member of the Biological and Environmental Research Federal Advisory Committee for the U.S. Dept. of Energy Office of Science. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

200. Shi, Z., S.D. Allison, Y. He, P.A. Levine, A.M. Hoyt, J. Beem-Miller, W. Wieder, Q. Zhu, S.E. Trumbore, and J.T. Randerson. 2020. The age distribution of global soil carbon inferred from radiocarbon measurements. Nature Geosciences. doi: 10.1038/s41561-020-0596-z.

199. Anderegg, W.R.L., A.T. Trugman, G. Badgley, C.M. Anderson, A. Bartuska, P. Ciais, D. Cullenward, C.B. Field, J. Freeman, S.J. Goetz, J.A. Hicke, D. Huntzinger, R.B. Jackson, J. Nickerson, S. Pacala, and J.T. Randerson. 2020. Forests as natural climate solutions: Integrating risks from a changing climate. Science. 497: eaaz7005.
doi: 10.1126/science.aaz7005.

198. Deser, C., F. Lehner, K. B. Rodgers, T. Ault, T. L. Delworth, P. N. DiNezio, A. Fiore, C. Frankignoul, J. C. Fyfe, D. E. Horton, J. E. Kay, R. Knutti, N. S. Lovenduski, J. Marotzke, K. A. McKinnon, S. Minobe, J. Randerson, J. A. Screen, I. R. Simpson and M. Ting, 2020: Insights from earth system model initial-condition large ensembles and future prospects. Nature Climate Change. doi: 10.1038/s41558-020-0731-2.

197. Graff, C.A., S. Coffield, Y. Chen, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, J.T. Randerson, and P. Smyth. 2020. Forecasting daily wildfire activity using Poisson regression. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. doi: 10.1109/TGRS.2020.2968029.

196. Potter, S., K. Solvik, A. Erb, S.J. Goetz, J.F. Johnstone, M.C. Mack, J.T. Randerson, M.O. Román, C.L. Schaaf, M.R. Turetsky, S. Veraverbeke, X.J. Walker, Z. Wang, R. Massey, and B.M. Rogers. 2019. Climate change decreases the cooling effect from post-fire albedo in boreal North America. Global Change Biology. doi:10.1111/gcb.14888.

195. Lawrence, D.M., R. Fisher, C.D. Koven, K.W. Oleson, S. Swenson, G. Bonan, N. Collier, B. Ghimire, L. van Kampenhout, D. Kennedy, E. Kluzek, P.J. Lawrence, F. Li, H. Li, D. Lombardozzi, W.J. Riley, W. Sacks, M. Shi, M. Vertenstein, W. R. Wieder, C. Xu, A. Ali, A. Badger, G. Bisht, P. Broxton, M. Brunke, S. Burns, J. Buzan, M. Clark, T. Craig, K. Dahlin, B. Drewniak, L. Emmons, J. Fisher, M. Flanner, A. Fox, P. Gentine, F. Hoffman, R. Knox, S. Kumar, J. Lenaerts, S. Levis, L. R. Leung, W. Lipscomb, Y. Lu, A. Pandey, J. Pelletier, J. Perket, J. Randerson, D.M. Ricciuto, B. Sanderson, A. Slater, Z.M. Subin, J. Tang, Q. Thomas, S. Tilmes, M. Val Martin, F. Vitt, and X. Zeng. 2019. The Community Land Model version 5: Description of new features, benchmarking, and impact of forcing uncertainty. Journal of Advances in Modeling the Earth System. 11(12): 4245-4287. doi:10.1029/2018MS001583.

194. Fowler M.D., G.J. Kooperman, J.T. Randerson, and M.S. Pritchard. 2019. The effect of plant-physiological responses to rising CO2 on global streamflow. Nature Climate Change. doi:10.1038/s41558-019-0602-x.

193. Gorris, M.E., K.K. Treseder, C.S. Zender, and J.T. Randerson. 2019. Expansion of coccidioidomycosis endemic regions in the United States in response to climate change. GeoHealth. 10.1029/2019GH000209.

192. Coffield, S.R., C.A. Graff, Y. Chen, P. Smyth, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, and J.T. Randerson. 2019. Machine learning to predict final fire size at the time of ignition. International Journal of Wildland Fire. doi: 10.1071/WF19023.

American Geophysical Union, Fellow

Ecological Society of America

American Association for the Advancement of Science

National Academy of Sciences of the United States

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=4971

Last updated
07/21/2020