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A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling (2012)

Chapter: Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
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APPENDIX C

Biographical Sketches of Committee Members

Dr. Chris Bretherton (Chair), University of Washington

Chris Bretherton is currently a professor in the University of Washington Departments of Atmospheric Science and Applied Mathematics. His research focuses on the interactions of atmospheric turbulence and convection, clouds and climate, and includes observational analyses, cloud-scale modeling, and climate model development. He teaches classes on weather, atmospheric turbulence and cumulus convection, tropical meteorology, geophysical fluid dynamics, and numerical and analytical methods for solving ordinary and partial differential equations. Dr. Bretherton is a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report, leader of the CGILS international cloud feedbacks model intercomparison project, and a former director of the University of Washington Program on Climate Change. His research group developed the parameterizations of shallow cumulus convection used in the newest versions of two leading U.S. climate models, the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Atmosphere Model, version 5 (CAM5), and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) Atmosphere Model, version 3 (AM3), as well as the turbulence parameterization used in CAM5, and is currently working with the National Centers for Environmental Prediction to improve the representation of boundary-layer clouds in the U.S. operational global weather and seasonal climate forecast models.

Dr. Venkatramani Balaji, Princeton University

V. Balaji heads the Modeling Systems Group serving developers of Earth system models at GFDL and Princeton University. With a background in physics and climate science, he has become an expert in the area of parallel computing and scientific infrastructure, providing high-level programming interfaces for expressing parallelism in scientific algorithms. He has pioneered the use of frameworks (such as the Flexible Modeling System [FMS], as well as community standards such as Earth System Modeling Framework [ESMF] and PRISM) allowing the construction of climate models out of independently developed components sharing a technical architecture; and

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
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of curators (FMS Runtime Environment, FRE) for the execution of complex workflows to manage the complete climate modeling process. The Earth System Curator (U.S.) and Metafor (EU) projects, in which he plays a key role, have developed the use of a common information model, which allows the execution of complex scientific queries on model data archives. V. Balaji plays advisory roles on National Science Foundation (NSF), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Department of Energy (DOE) review panels, including the recent series of exascale workshops. He is a sought-after speaker and lecturer and is committed to provide training in the use of climate models in developing nations, leading workshops to advanced students and researchers in South Africa and India.

Dr. Thomas L. Delworth, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory

Thomas L. Delworth is a research scientist and Group Leader in the Climate Change, Variability and Prediction Group at NOAA’s GFDL. He is also a lecturer at Princeton University in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program. Dr. Delworth has played a key role in the development of several generations of climate models at GFDL. His research largely focuses on decadal to centennial climate variability and change through the synthesis of climate models and observational data. On these time scales the behavior of the climate system is a mixture of natural variability and the response of the climate system to changing radiative forcing induced by changing greenhouse gases and aerosols. Understanding the natural variability of the climate system on decadal scales is critical to our ability to detect climate change, and to understand the processes responsible for observed change from the global to the regional scale.

Dr. Robert E. Dickinson, The University of Texas at Austin

Robert E. Dickinson joined the Department of Geological Sciences in August of 2008. For the previous 9 years, he was professor of atmospheric sciences and held the Georgia Power/Georgia Research Alliance Chair at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the 9 years before that he was professor of atmospheric sciences and Regents Professor at the University of Arizona, and for the previous 22 years he was a Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1988 and to the National Academy of Engineering in 2002, and was elected a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2006. His research interests are in climate modeling, climate variability and change, aerosols, the hydrologic cycle and droughts, land-surface processes, the terrestrial carbon cycle, and the application of remote sensing data to modeling of land-surface processes.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
×

Dr. James A. Edmonds, Joint Global Change Research Institute

Jae Edmonds is a Chief Scientist and Laboratory Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Joint Global Change Research Institute, a collaboration with the University of Maryland at College Park. His research in the areas of long-term, global, energy, technology, economy, and climate change spans three decades, producing several books, numerous scientific papers, and countless presentations. He is one of the pioneers in the field of integrated assessment modeling of climate change. His principal research focus is the role of energy technology in addressing climate change. He is the Chief Scientist for the Integrated Assessment Research Program in the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. He has been an active participant in all of the major assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Dr. James S. Famiglietti, University of California, Irvine

James S. Famiglietti holds a joint faculty appointment in Earth System Science and in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where he is the founding director of the system-wide UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling. He holds a B.S. in geology from Tufts University, an M.S. in hydrology from the University of Arizona, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in civil engineering and operations research from Princeton University. He completed his postdoctoral studies in hydrology and climate system modeling at Princeton and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Before joining the faculty at UCI in 2001, Dr. Famiglietti was an assistant and associate professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, and was the Associate Director of the UT Environmental Science Institute. He is the past Chair of the Board of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI), and past Editor in Chief of Geophysical Research Letters. His research concerns the role of hydrology in the coupled Earth system. Areas of activity include the continued development of the hydrologic components of climate models; climate system modeling for studies of land-ocean-atmosphere-human interaction; and remote sensing of the terrestrial and global water cycles, including groundwater depletion and freshwater availability. Dr. Famiglietti is currently leading the Community Hydrologic Modeling Platform (CHyMP) effort to accelerate the development of hydrologic models for use in addressing national and international priorities related to water, food, economic, climate, and national security.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
×

Dr. Inez Y. Fung, University of California, Berkeley

Inez Fung is a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been studying climate change for the past 20 years. She is a principal architect of large-scale mathematical modeling approaches and numerical models to represent the geographic and temporal variations of sources and sinks of CO2, dust, and other trace substances around the globe. Dr. Fung’s work in carbonclimate modeling concludes that the diminishing capacities of the land and oceans to store carbon act to accelerate global warming. She has initiated a new project to assimilate raw meteorological data and satellite CO2 observations into a climate model to produce the best estimation of the four-dimensional distribution of CO2 in the atmosphere. Dr. Fung received her S.B. in applied mathematics and her Sc.D. in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She joined the Berkeley faculty in 1998 as the first Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences and the founding Director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center.

Dr. James J. Hack, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

James J. Hack directs the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), a leadership computing facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory supporting transformational science. He identifies major high-performance computing needs from scientific and hardware perspectives and puts forth strategies to meet those needs as machines evolve to the petascale, able to carry out a quadrillion calculations per second. An atmospheric scientist, Dr. Hack also leads ORNL’s Climate Change Initiative. Dr. Hack became a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he worked on the design and evaluation of high-performance computing architectures. In 1984 he moved to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a National Science Foundation-sponsored center, where his roles included Senior Scientist, head of the Climate Modeling Section, and Deputy Director of the Climate and Global Dynamics Division. He was one of the principal developers of the climate model that ran on NCCS supercomputers to provide more than one-third of the simulation data jointly contributed by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to the most recent assessment report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
×

Dr. James W. Hurrell, National Center for Atmospheric Research

James (Jim) W. Hurrell is the Director of the Earth System Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). NCAR is a federally funded research and development center that works with partners at universities and researchers to explore and understand the atmosphere and its interactions with the sun, the oceans, the biosphere, and human society. Dr. Hurrell joined NCAR after earning his doctorate in atmospheric science from Purdue University. His research has centered on empirical and modeling studies and diagnostic analyses to better understand climate, climate variability, and climate change. He has been involved in assessment activities of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Dr. Hurrell has been extensively involved in the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) on Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR), including roles as cochair of the Scientific Steering Group (SSG) of both U.S. and international CLIVAR and membership on several other CLIVAR panels. His former roles at NCAR include service as Director of the Climate and Global Dynamics Division and Chief Scientist of the Community Earth System Model (CESM). He has given testimony on climate change issues for congressional subcommittees and has received numerous prestigious honors and awards in his field of atmospheric science.

Dr. Daniel J. Jacob, Harvard University

Daniel J. Jacob is a professor of atmospheric chemistry and environmental engineering at Harvard University. The goal of his research is to understand the chemical composition of the atmosphere, its perturbation by human activity, and the implications for climate change and life on Earth. His approaches include global modeling of atmospheric chemistry and climate, aircraft measurement campaigns, satellite data retrievals, and analyses of atmospheric observations.

Dr. James L. Kinter III, Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies

James (Jim) L. Kinter is Director of the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA), where he manages all aspects of basic and applied climate research conducted by the Center. Dr. Kinter’s research includes studies of climate predictability on seasonal and longer time scales. Of particular interest in his research are prospects for prediction of El Niño and the extratropical response to tropical sea-surface temperature anomalies using high-resolution coupled general circulation models of Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and land surface. Dr. Kinter is also an associate professor in the

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
×

Climate Dynamics Ph.D. Program and the Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences department at George Mason University, where he has responsibilities for curriculum development and teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on climate change, as well as advising Ph.D. students. After earning his doctorate in geophysical fluid dynamics at Princeton University in 1984, Dr. Kinter served as a National Research Council Associate at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and as a faculty member of the University of Maryland prior to joining COLA. Dr. Kinter has served on many national review panels for both scientific research programs and supercomputing programs for computational climate modeling.

Dr. L. Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

L. Ruby Leung is a Laboratory Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Her research focuses on understanding and modeling regional climate including the role of land-atmosphere interactions, orographic processes, and aerosol effects on water-cycle variability and extremes. She has led important efforts in defining research priorities and needs in regional climate modeling and coordinated community efforts to develop capability in community mesoscale models to simulate regional climate. Currently she is leading a team project to apply a hierarchical evaluation framework to evaluate different approaches to modeling climate at the regional scale.

Dr. Shawn Marshall, University of Calgary

Shawn Marshall joined University of Calgary’s Department of Geography in January 2000, following Ph.D. and postdoctoral research at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He is a glaciologist and climatologist with research programs that focus on glacier and ice-sheet dynamics, ice-climate interactions, and paleoclimatology. He is active in ice-sheet model development and in efforts to couple ice sheet and climate models, and also works extensively as a “user” of climate model output to drive scenarios for cryosphere response to climate change. He has served as Director of the Arctic Institute of North America, as Chair of the American Geophysical Union Cryospheric Sciences group, and on the Science Steering Committees of the Canadian Arctic research agency (Polar Continental Shelf Project) and the NCAR Community Earth System Model enterprise.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
×

Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School

Wieslaw Maslowski is a research professor of oceanography at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Dr. Maslowski’s research interests include polar oceanography and sea ice; regional ocean, sea-ice, and climate modeling and prediction; mesoscale processes in the ocean and sea ice and their interaction with and impact on general ocean circulation, climate change, and climate variability; ocean-ice sheet and air-sea-ice interactions and feedbacks. He is currently leading a DOE-supported research program to develop a Regional Arctic System Model (RASM). Dr. Maslowski earned his Ph.D. from the University of Alaska in 1994.

Dr. Linda O. Mearns, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Linda O. Mearns is Director of the Weather and Climate Impacts Assessment Science Program (WCIASP), Head of the Regional Integrated Sciences Collective (RISC) within the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe), and Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado. She served as Director of the Institute for the Study of Society and Environment (ISSE) for 3 years ending in April 2008. She holds a Ph.D. in geography/climatology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has performed research and published mainly in the areas of climate change scenario formation, quantifying uncertainties, and climate change impacts on agro-ecosystems. She has particularly worked extensively with regional climate models. She has been an author in the IPCC Climate Change 1995, 2001, and 2007 Assessments regarding climate variability, impacts of climate change on agriculture, regional projections of climate change, climate scenarios, and uncertainty in future projections of climate change. For the Fifth Assessment Report (due out in 2013) she is a lead author of Chapter 21 on Regions in WG2. She leads the multiagency-supported North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP), which is providing multiple high-resolution climate change scenarios for the North American impacts community. She has been a member of the National Research Council Climate Research Committee (CRC), the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Adaptation of the America’s Climate Choices Program, and is currently a member of the Human Dimensions of Global Change (HDGC) Committee. She was made a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in January 2006.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
×

Dr. Richard B. Rood, University of Michigan

Richard B. Rood is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences and in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Michigan. He teaches dynamical meteorology and physical climate. In 2006 he initiated a cross-discipline graduate course on climate change, which addresses critical analysis and complex problem solving. As a member of the Senior Executive Service at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Dr. Rood directed both scientific and high-performance computing organizations. Dr. Rood’s current research is focused on the use of science-based knowledge of Earth’s climate in societal applications and policy. He writes the climate change blog for the Weather Underground (wunderground.com).

Dr. Larry L. Smarr, University of California, San Diego

Larry Smarr is the founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego (UCSD)/UC Irvine partnership, and holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at UCSD’s Jacobs School. At Calit2, Dr. Smarr has continued to drive major developments in information infrastructure—including the Internet, Web, scientific visualization, virtual reality, and global telepresence—begun during his previous 15 years as founding Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Dr. Smarr served as principal investigator on NSF’s OptIPuter project and currently is principal investigator of the Moore Foundation’s CAMERA project and co-principal investigator of NSF’s GreenLight project.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
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A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling Get This Book
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As climate change has pushed climate patterns outside of historic norms, the need for detailed projections is growing across all sectors, including agriculture, insurance, and emergency preparedness planning. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling emphasizes the needs for climate models to evolve substantially in order to deliver climate projections at the scale and level of detail desired by decision makers, this report finds. Despite much recent progress in developing reliable climate models, there are still efficiencies to be gained across the large and diverse U.S. climate modeling community. Evolving to a more unified climate modeling enterprise-in particular by developing a common software infrastructure shared by all climate researchers and holding an annual climate modeling forum-could help speed progress.

Throughout this report, several recommendations and guidelines are outlined to accelerate progress in climate modeling. The U.S. supports several climate models, each conceptually similar but with components assembled with slightly different software and data output standards. If all U.S. climate models employed a single software system, it could simplify testing and migration to new computing hardware, and allow scientists to compare and interchange climate model components, such as land surface or ocean models. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling recommends an annual U.S. climate modeling forum be held to help bring the nation's diverse modeling communities together with the users of climate data. This would provide climate model data users with an opportunity to learn more about the strengths and limitations of models and provide input to modelers on their needs and provide a venue for discussions of priorities for the national modeling enterprise, and bring disparate climate science communities together to design common modeling experiments.

In addition, A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling explains that U.S. climate modelers will need to address an expanding breadth of scientific problems while striving to make predictions and projections more accurate. Progress toward this goal can be made through a combination of increasing model resolution, advances in observations, improved model physics, and more complete representations of the Earth system. To address the computing needs of the climate modeling community, the report suggests a two-pronged approach that involves the continued use and upgrading of existing climate-dedicated computing resources at modeling centers, together with research on how to effectively exploit the more complex computer hardware systems expected over the next 10 to 20 years.

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