Chris Bretherton is an atmospheric scientist who studies cloud formation and turbulence and improves how they are simulated in global climate and weather forecast models. Since September 2021, he has led a philanthropically supported climate model development group at AI2 in Seattle, in collaboration with NOAA GFDL, to use machine learning trained on global cloud-resolving model output to improve the simulation of regional precipitation trends and extremes in climate models. This initiative was started in 2019 at Vulcan, Inc.

His University of Washington research group has helped lead field experiments and observational analyses and has pioneered new frontiers in three-dimensional modelling of fluid flow in and around fields of clouds, including understanding how clouds will respond to and feed back on climate change. The two leading US climate models use computer code developed by his research group for simulating cloud formation by atmospheric turbulence.

He was a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report in 2013, chair of a 2012 National Academy report entitled A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modelling, and a former director of the University of Washington Programme on Climate Change. In 2012, he received the Jule G. Charney Award, one of the two highest career awards of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and he was the 2019 AMS Haurwitz Lecturer. He is a Fellow of the AMS and AGU and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Washington State Academy of Sciences.