Linda Mearns is the Director of the Weather and Climate Impacts Assessment Science Program (WCIASP) and Head of the Regional Integrated Sciences Collective (RISC) within the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe), and Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado.

She has served as Director of the Institute for the Study of Society and Environment (ISSE) for three years ending in April 2008.  She holds a Ph.D. in Geography/Climatology from UCLA.  She has performed research and published mainly in the areas of climate change scenario formation, quantifying uncertainties, and climate change impacts on agro-ecosystems.  She has particularly worked extensively with regional climate models. She has  been an  author in the IPCC Climate Change 1995, 2001, and 2007 Assessments regarding climate variability,  impacts of climate change on agriculture, regional projections of climate change, climate scenarios, and uncertainty in future projections of climate change.  For the Fifth Assessment Report (due out in 2013) she is a lead author of Chapter 21 on Regions in WG2. She leads the multi-agency supported North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP), which is providing multiple high-resolution climate change scenarios for the North American impacts community.  She has been a member of the National Research Council Climate Research Committee (CRC), the NAS Panel on Adaptation of the America’s Climate Choices Program, and the NAS Human Dimensions of Global Change (HDGC) Committee. She currently is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Advancing Climate Modeling.  She has worked extensively with resource managers (e.g., water resource managers and ecologists) to form climate change scenarios for use in adaptation planning. 

Linda was made a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in January 2006.