[3] In 2003, she graduated with a bachelor's degree in science from University of Wales, Bangor, UK, where she earned Joint Honours in Physical Oceanography and Marine Biology.
[3] Ummenhofer wrote her thesis on the "Southern Hemisphere Regional Precipitation and Climate Variability: Extremes, Trends and Predictability,"[4] which won the Uwe Radok Award by the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society in the category of atmosphere/ocean/climate science.
[8] Ummenhofer shows that the droughts taking place in Australia's western and southern border are instead caused by a lack of negative Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) event.
In this study, Ummenhofer also brings awareness to the warming of the Indian Ocean due to climate change, and how this will affect the weather patterns in countries surrounding this body of water.
[8] In 2016, L. Li, R. W. Schmitt, C. C. Ummenhofer, and K. B. Karnauskas published North Atlantic Salinity as a Predictor of Sahel Rainfall[9] which predicted precipitation in the U.S. Southwest more accurately than conventional forecasting.