Dr. Clara Draper is a physical scientist at the NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory (PSL) in Boulder, Colorado. She joined NOAA in 2017, most recently from the NASA Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO), where she worked from 2011 to 2017. Dr. Draper's research is focused on coupled land/atmosphere data assimilation. Her current projects include developing an improved snow data assimilation scheme for NOAA's global weather forecasting system, prototyping a new soil moisture and soil temperature analysis for use in the same system, developing perturbation strategies to account for land model uncertainty in atmospheric ensembles, and improving the observed information obtained from the assimilation of Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observations.