Davis Appointed Paros Chair of Atmospheric Research and Hazard Mitigation

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The UMass Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of Professor Christopher Davis as the Paros Chair of Atmospheric Research and Hazard Mitigation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

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Christopher Davis

Davis holds a dual appointment in the Department of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences within the College of Natural Sciences and in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering within the Riccio College of Engineering.

The Paros Chair was established through a $10 million gift from Jerome (1960) and Linda Paros, which also provides support for the Paros Center for Atmospheric Research (PCAR) and funding for the Paros Fellows/Scholars Endowed Fund in support of graduate fellowships and undergraduate scholarships.

As the Paros Chair, Davis takes on the leadership of PCAR. "I am thrilled to be leading the Paros Center,” says Davis. “It presents an exciting opportunity to bring together engineering and natural sciences under an interdisciplinary framework for improving hazard detection, prediction, and decision making. I am grateful to Jerry and Linda Paros for providing the foundation that we can build on to grow this vibrant program.”

Davis joined the faculty in 2026. Prior to arriving at UMass Amherst, he was a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), a role he held since 1990. He has served as director of NCAR’s Advanced Study Program; associate director of NCAR for the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Laboratory; a senior advisor to the NCAR Director; and deputy director of NCAR Education, Engagement and Early-Career Development (EdEC).

Davis has extensive experience in the atmospheric sciences, working to understand and predict the behavior of the atmosphere related to high-impact weather—including tropical cyclones, extratropical cyclones, atmospheric rivers, severe storms, terrain-induced local wind circulations, and winter storms. 

He has co-organized two major field programs, the Bow-echo and MCV Experiment (BAMEX, 2003), and the PRE-Depression Investigation of Cloud-systems in the Tropics (PREDICT) field campaign in 2010 to study the earliest stages of hurricane formation over the Atlantic Ocean. Davis has also worked for many years to develop and apply new verification methodologies to high-resolution forecasts. He has consistently bridged theoretical and applied research through a combination of numerical simulation and observational analysis.

Among his many achievements, Davis has chaired the Science Steering Committee (SSC) of the World Weather Research Programme of WMO since 2020 and has served on the SSC since 2018. He has served on the Modeling and Data Assimilation Steering Committee for Atmospheric River Reconnaissance since 2019.

Davis received his Bachelor of Science degree in physics from UMass Amherst in 1985 and a Ph.D. in Meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1990.