About

Dr. Heidi Roop is an associate professor in the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate at the University of Minnesota and an extension specialist. She is a national expert in climate science and adaptation, serving as the Director of the University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership, a leading applied research and extension program that provides cutting-edge climate science, resilience resources, and technical assistance. The program has become a model for university-based climate services programs across the country. Dr. Roop has also served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as the Assistant Director of Climate Services from 2024-2025, where she played a leadership role in coordinating global change research and services across federal agencies and advised the White House on climate risk management. Her interdisciplinary research broadly focuses on integrating climate information into decision-making processes at various scales, from community resilience planning to international negotiations. She is also an affiliate professor at the University of Washington School of Public Health and author of The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions for Everyone.

Research topics

• Meteorology
• Oceanography
• Geology
• Atmospheric sciences
• Geography
• Climatology
• Environmental science
• Ecology
• Physics
• Geomorphology
• Nuclear physics

Selected publications

• County‐Scale Climate Projections Over Minnesota and the Effects of Lakes

  Water Resources Research · 2026-02-01

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Climate projections for three future shared socioeconomic pathway scenarios from six CMIP6 global climate models (GCMs) were dynamically downscaled over Minnesota with the regional Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled to a lake model at 4‐km horizontal resolution representing energy and moisture fluxes over more than 60 lakes inside the state borders. Warming over Minnesota is projected to increase in all seasons, especially in winter. Snow depth and lake ice cover is expected to decrease. However, compared to GCM projections, our results show stronger increases in spring and early summer precipitation, potentially from the extra evaporation over lakes. This trend especially manifests in heavier precipitation events. Precipitation is expected to decrease during the peak growing season in middle and late summer. We anticipate that temperature and precipitation values will be significantly different by the middle and end of the 21st century, respectively, from what has been observed at the beginning of the 21st century. Winters and summers are expected to be up to 7 and 4°C warmer, respectively, especially over northern and central Minnesota. Average spring precipitation may increase by more than 1 mm d −1 over central Minnesota. Despite generally stronger precipitation, winter snow depth is projected to decrease by more than 12 cm, especially around the Lake Superior shores and in northern Minnesota. Lake ice cover is projected to decrease by more than half over deeper lakes. The number of lake ice days per year and days per year with snow depth of more than 2.54 cm may decrease by up to 70 and 55, respectively.

  PublisherDOI

• Rising Seas: Representations of Antarctica, Climate Change, And Sea Level Rise in U.S. Newspaper Coverage

  Environmental Communication · 2025-06-09

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  A changing Antarctica carries large implications for global climate systems and sea level rise. However, how climate change is altering Antarctica and how these changes are communicated in news media remains unclear. This article explores how Antarctica, climate change, and sea level rise are portrayed in digital print news media by conducting a content analysis of Antarctic climate coverage in seven U.S. newspapers between March 2007 and December 2022. Findings suggest that newspaper reporting of Antarctica’s changing climate is limited, and that framed coverage about Antarctica, climate change, and sea level rise primarily emphasizes scientific and ecological implications.

  PublisherDOI

• Leveraging Partnership in the Cuban National Health System to Protect People from the Health Harms of Climate Change

  Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies · 2025-07-11

  articleOpen access

  In Cuba and elsewhere, climate change is harming human health in myriad ways. This article reviews the climate change-related health risks faced by people in tropical small-island developing nations throughout the Caribbean. It provides an overview of Cuba’s partnership- and solidarity-oriented National Health System (Sistema Nacional de Salud de Cuba, or SNS), which, despite severe financial and material limitations, maintains a strong focus on universal coverage, primary care, and disease prevention. This highly effective and efficient system can be further leveraged to prevent harms to people’s health from climate change. As an example, we focus on chronic kidney disease and describe current efforts and future potential for leveraging the partnership-based Cuban model to address this climate change-related health threat. We conclude by examining how the Cuban model could be harnessed in other nations to effectively mitigate and adapt to the human health impacts of climate change.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Extreme Precipitation Intensity-Duration-Frequency Estimates for the State of Minnesota Built from Dynamically Downscaled Climate Model Simulations

  2025-07-28 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Flooding risk is projected to increase throughout the 21st Century in the Upper Midwest of the United States due to the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall events. As the design of stormwater infrastructure is commonly done based on observational datasets and probabilistic models, which rely on climate stationarity, it has become increasingly important to develop new ways of estimating the probability of extreme events in a changing climate. Here, we provide an estimate of non-stationary Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves built from Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) dynamically downscaled simulations from CMIP6 projections for the state of Minnesota. We provide relative changes with respect to historical (1995-2014) simulations as well as absolute IDF value projections for three future time periods (2040-2059, 2060-2079, 2080-2099) in a high resolution (~4km) grid. Statewide average 24-hr-duration, 2-, 10-, and 50-year-frequency rainfall events are projected to increase by a median of 10.4mm/day, 18.6mm/day, and 44.2 mm/day, respectively, under an SSP 3-7.0 scenario. A comparison of bias correction methods and observational precipitation datasets is provided, showcasing the varying capacity that different models have to capture intense and localized precipitation events. Precipitation intensity increases significantly for all precipitation durations, though spatial heterogeneity and model variability are considerable, especially for frequencies of 50 years and greater. Our results provide the first non-stationary IDF curve resource for the state of Minnesota using CMIP6 and highlight the need to update commonly used resources and practices that rely on the characterization of extreme precipitation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Managing for tomorrow—A climate adaptation decision framework

  Antarctica A Keystone in a Changing World · 2025-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Fine-scale Climate Projections over Minnesota for the 21st Century 

  2025-03-15 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Global warming has its largest amplitude in the higher latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere. This is especially the case during winter months when reduced reflectivity from diminished snow cover leads to higher average temperatures. This process has led to warming at twice the rate as the rest of the planet. In addition to accelerated warming from local snow melt, this Arctic warming is contributing to strong warming over Minnesota, especially during winter, when Minnesota is one of the states that is warming the strongest within the contiguous United States. We have previously emphasized this strong warming in our study on high-resolution climate projections over Minnesota with CMIP5, and we are now producing an updated dataset with higher spatial resolution and with input from six CMIP6 global climate models (GCMs), namely BCC-CSM2-MR, CESM2, CMCC-ESM2, CNRM-ESM2-1, IPSL-CM6A-LR, and MIROC-ES2L.   We use ensemble climate simulations over Minnesota with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to compute downscaled versions of the comprehensive global climate projections for the 20-year periods 2040-2059, 2060-2079, and 2080-2099. We also perform model integrations over the historical period of 1995-2014 in order to assess any systematic model uncertainties. These projections build on our previous results at 10-km resolution, but now we use a higher 4-km horizontal resolution over Minnesota nested in a 20-km grid over the contiguous USA and southern Canada with 38 vertical levels in the atmosphere and a sophisticated representation of the many lakes that exist in Minnesota. Our final results will show a more detailed representation of the ongoing warming for individual counties in Minnesota in all seasons, especially in winter. We expect conditions near the end of the 21st century that are significantly different from current climate. Our results will influence regional decision-making related to agriculture, infrastructure, water resources, and other sectors.

  PublisherDOI

• Social network analysis to understand participant engagement in transdisciplinary team science: a large U.S. Science and Technology Center case study

  Humanities and Social Sciences Communications · 2025-03-20 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Funding agencies like the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) increasingly fund transdisciplinary research collaboratives to tackle complex societal problems and accelerate innovation. Initiatives such as the NSF Science and Technology Centers (STCs) convene researchers from diverse disciplines to collaborate to address scientific challenges at the nexus of science and technology innovation. The longitudinal evolution of a Center’s social network offers a valuable evaluative tool for understanding how different Center activities and participant identities foster/inhibit an environment conducive to transdisciplinary collaboration and innovation. Given that STC members participate in Center activities with different degrees of involvement, understanding the varying relationships and levels of engagement exhibited within a Center can help to evaluate the effectiveness of team science collaborations in realizing their goals and objectives in real time. A driving question is whether the whole of an interdisciplinary team is greater than the sum of its parts. In this article, a Science of Team Science mixed-methods social network analysis (SNA) approach is used to evaluate participation and provide data-driven evidence into how relational connections facilitate or hinder pathways for knowledge exchange in an STC called the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration. Using SNA, we establish a set of baseline “participation typologies” with which to measure the evolution of connectivity across the lifetime of the Center. These typologies indicate that pathways to engagement and collaboration are enabled through one’s connection or exposure to different research teams across the Center, as well as through the quality of connection reported between Center participants. Insights from early career researcher participation show how early investment in such activities can strengthen a participant’s connection quality and expose different disciplines to alternative approaches. This methodology can be applied to other large transdisciplinary endeavors to provide real-time evaluation and inform interventions to improve cross-team connections and collaboration.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An Assessment of the Midwest Climate Adaptation Network: A Call for Improved Coordination and Collaboration

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Thank You to Our 2023 Reviewers

  Community Science · 2024-06-01

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The editors of the Community Science Exchange want to say a big thank you to the 29 reviewers for reviewing for Community Science in 2023. Peer‐review is essential to the process of doing and publishing scientific findings, and will be a pillar of our successful expansion of science by, with and for communities into mainstream science. Many papers start with an inquiry, allowing us to assist prospective authors in inclusion of community voice. These consultations also allow us to respect reviewers' time as we only send papers for review that meet our criteria.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An assessment of the Midwest climate adaptation network: A call for improved coordination and collaboration

  Journal of Environmental Management · 2024-09-20 · 4 citations

  articleCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alexander L. Forrest

  University of California, Davis

  15 shared

• R. H. Levy

  13 shared

• Sam Illingworth

  Edinburgh Napier University

  13 shared

• Gavin Dunbar

  Victoria University of Wellington

  13 shared

• Guillaume Leduc

  Centre de Recherche et d’Enseignement de Géosciences de l’Environnement

  12 shared

• David W. Clow

  Colorado Water Science Center

  11 shared

• Marcus J. Vandergoes

  GNS Science

  11 shared

• Anaïs Orsi

  University of British Columbia

  10 shared