Mike is a CIRES scientist working in NOAA's Physical Sciences Laboratory as a research hydrologist. His mission is to improve how the world monitors and understands drought and what drives it by conducting fundamental research into land surface/atmosphere hydrology. In particular, he studies evapotranspiration and evaporative demand (the thirst of the atmosphere) and the drivers of hydrologic variability and extremes. Once Mike identifies early warnings of drought in the United States and famine in food-insecure countries, he passes on this knowledge to stakeholders in the drought-monitoring and scientific communities as decision-support tools and datasets.