When Arianna Varuolo-Clarke was growing up, her favorite evenings were spent watching the Weather Channel with her grandfather. She wanted to “chase thunderstorms” and understand where tornadoes came from, she said. She decided to become an atmospheric scientist. In 2014, she landed an internship at the National Center for Atmospheric Research as a college sophomore, and quickly realized that her path as a woman of color would not be easy.

“You’d walk through the halls and it’s a lot of old white men,” Ms. Varuolo-Clarke said. Still, she pushed forward and began her Ph.D. in atmospheric science at Columbia University last year.

The field’s lack of diversity gained new urgency in May when her graduate student cohort was targeted with a series of racist emails. The messages, sent to affiliates of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia by a person outside the community, said that black people were genetically inferior and did not belong in academia. It was “hurtful and invalidating” to be told that she didn’t belong in the world that had drawn her in since childhood, Ms. Varuolo-Clarke said. “It was an isolated incident. But it brought to the surface what still needs to be done in the field.”

In a commentary last week in Nature Geoscience, Kuheli Dutt, Lamont-Doherty’s assistant director for academic affairs and diversity, wrote that “a lack of diversity and inclusion is the single largest cultural problem facing the geosciences today.”