Arlene Laing
Coordinating Director
Dr Arlene Laing is the Coordinating Director of the Caribbean Meteorological Organization (CMO), which has its headquarters in Trinidad and Tobago. CMO is a specialized agency of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) that coordinates the joint scientific and technical activities in weather, climate and water - related sciences in sixteen English-speaking Caribbean Countries. Since Dr Laing's arrival at CMO, she has been elected as a Member of the Executive Council of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Dr Laing is known for her studies in several areas of meteorology, such as thunderstorm systems,
flash floods and mitigation, satellite meteorology, tropical cyclone rainfall and genesis, wildfire forecasting,
lightning and El Niño. She also studied weather, climate, and meningitis; climate and armed conflict; and volcanic
ash fall modelling. She is the lead author of
Just prior to joining CMO, Dr Laing was a Scientific Analyst at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, with the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) in Boulder, Colorado, USA. After obtaining her BSc (Hons) from the University of the West Indies-Cave Hill, she worked as a forecaster in Jamaica then received an OAS fellowship to pursue graduate studies at Pennsylvania State University. Subsequently, she was a postdoctoral fellow at CIRA, an assistant professor at the University of South Florida, a scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a project scientist with the COMET Program - creating multimedia training for forecasters, an adjunct professor of North Carolina State University, and a project facilitator at the Weather Prediction Center of the US National Weather Service - helping to transfer research into operational forecasting. Along the way she gained experience in project management and international collaboration.