You've arrived at the website of Nicholas D. Lybarger (though I prefer Nick).  

I am currently a Project Scientist working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO.  I work primarily with Andy Newman and Ethan Gutmann in the Hydrometeorological Applications Program within the Research Applications Laboratory at developing methods to assess climate model performance over the western US and provide reliable information to water safety managers as to what they can reasonably expect from a changing climate.  Because these water managers typically operate on the basin or sub-basin scale, providing high resolution information is crucially important, particularly over the western US, where topographical heterogeneity can drastically affect climate projections over a very small area.  Assessment and application of dynamical and statistical downscaling techniques is therefore crucially important as well.  By assessing which ESMs perform best as compared to the historical climate, applying the downscaling techniques that perform best over this region, and ultimately forcing hydrological models with this downscaled data, we hope to provide impact assessment models with the best possible data to project local changes in the future climate.

I am an avid hiker, lacrosse player, board and video game player, soccer/football/hockey fan, and brewery enthusiast.

My ESM evaluation method was recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, and has been adopted by the Army Corps of Engineers Climate Preparedness and Resilience Program for regional assessments of ESM hydroclimate projections:

https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JD039774

Check out another recent publication in MDPI Atmosphere based on some previous work as a post-doc, where we evaluated the UFS performance across spatial scales for a strongly sheared hurricane case study:

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/14/9/1457