Yvette Richardson


Yvette Richardson is an American meteorologist with substantial contributions on tornado dynamics, tornadogenesis, the environments of tornadoes, supercells, and severe convection, and radar observations of these. She was a principal investigator of VORTEX2.
Richardson graduated with Special Academic Honors at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls with a B.S. in physics in 1990. She earned a M.S. and Ph.D. in meteorology from the University of Oklahoma in 1993 and 1999, respectively. Richardson was a visiting assistant professor at OU from 1998 to 2000, was a research scientist at OU from 2000 to 2001, and has been a professor at Pennsylvania State University since 2002. She is a member of Sigma Pi Sigma and Phi Kappa Phi.
Richardson was on the steering committee, was a scientific-PI, and was co-coordinator of mobile mesonets for . She previously collaborated in other field projects, including , , , and . She coauthored the popular textbook, Mesoscale Meteorology in Midlatitudes, with Paul Markowski with whom she also wrote a major Weatherwise magazine article, How to Make a Tornado. Richardson is a co-writer of a rebuttal to a New York Times opinion piece by physicist Richard A. Muller challenging his contention that tornadic activity had decreased in the U.S. and his tying the alleged decline to global warming.