Ruby Leung to Highlight NERSC's Role in Climate Modeling
July 23, 2024
By Elizabeth Ball
Contact: cscomms@lbl.gov
Modeling is a key tool for understanding climate change and its effects in both the present and the future, and the computational power provided by NERSC systems has made many researchers’ climate models possible. One of those researchers, Ruby Leung of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), will discuss her work on Earth system modeling for actionable science and the role NERSC plays in it as part of the NERSC@50 seminar series.
Leung is a Battelle Fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Her research broadly cuts across multiple areas in modeling and analysis of climate and the hydrological cycle including land-atmosphere interactions, orographic processes, monsoon climate, climate extremes, land surface processes, and aerosol-cloud interactions. Her research on climate change impacts has been featured in Science, Popular Science, Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and major newspapers.
Leung is also the Chief Scientist of Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, a major effort to develop state-of-the-art capabilities for modeling human-Earth system processes on DOE’s next-generation high performance computers. She has organized key workshops sponsored by DOE, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and NASA, and served on advisory panels and committees that define future priorities and opportunities in Digital Twin, AI/ML, climate modeling, hydroclimate, and water cycle research. She has published over 500 papers in peer-reviewed journals and is an editor of the American Meteorological Society Journal of Hydrometeorology. Leung is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and Washington State Academy of Sciences. She is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and American Geophysical Union (AGU). She is the recipient of the AMS Hydrologic Sciences Medal in 2022, AGU Global Environmental Change Bert Bolin Award and Lecture in 2019 and the AGU Atmospheric Science Jacob Bjerknes Lecture in 2020. In 2021, Leung received the DOE Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellow Award.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.