Lai-yung Ruby Leung

Last updated
Lai-yung Ruby Leung
Ruby Leung (8696740216).jpg
Lai-yung Ruby Leung in 2010
Alma mater Chinese University of Hong Kong (BS), Texas A&M University (MS and PhD)
Known forEarth Systems Analysis, Climate Modeling
AwardsMember of National Academy of Engineering (2017)
Fellow at American Geophysical Union (2015)
Scientific career
FieldsClimate Models, Atmospheric Science, Hydrology
Institutions Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Lai-yung Ruby Leung is an atmospheric scientist internationally recognized in the field of Earth Systems modeling and hydrologic processes. She is known for her contributions to the development of local climate models, and for her understanding of the consequences of climate change. [1] [2] Her interests are diverse across mountain hydrometeorology, aerosol-cloud interactions, orographic precipitation and climate extremes.

Contents

Leung was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2017 for leadership in regional and global computer modeling of the Earth's climate and hydrological processes. In 2019, she became one of eight Battelle Fellows at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). [3]

Education and early life

Leung completed her B.S. (1984) with honors in Physics and Statistics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. [2] She then took two years to teach at a local high school, [3] after which she earned her M.S. (1988) and Ph.D. (1991) in Atmospheric Science from Texas A&M University. [2] With her advisor, Gerald North, she wrote her dissertation on "Atmospheric Variability on a Zonally Symmetric Land Planet," which studied the effects of external forcing on the atmosphere. [4] For her postgraduate degree, she co-authored a paper titled "A study of long-term climate change in a simple seasonal nonlinear climate model." [5]

Career and research

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Leung completed her research dissertation at PNNL in 1989 before beginning her career as a research associate in 1991. [3] She then worked as a staff scientist and senior scientist before becoming a laboratory fellow in 2004 and a Battelle Fellow in 2017. [3] Her current research focuses on the dynamics of various land-atmosphere interactions as well as hydrological cycles. Her team at PNNL was the first group of researchers to link soot deposition with snowpack availability in the western United States. [6] They also found that the primary cause of intense hurricanes is a climate cycle known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). [7] [8]

Along with other PNNL scientists, Leung contributed to the assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with Albert Arnold. [1] [9] As a contributing author of the report's Regional Climate Projections, she helped disseminate the knowledge on the consequences of anthropogenic activities in global warming. [10] [11]

Energy Exascale Earth System Model

In 2016, Leung was appointed as the chief climate scientist of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM), previously known as the Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME) project, by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). [12] [13] By shifting climate models from global to a regional scale, Leung and her team enhanced the efficiency of computational modeling. [1] [14] The model provides twice as much as details than the previous simulations and further allows for focusing on local climate effects. [14] Leung's leadership was crucial in investigating climate change through the perspectives of various Earth System components, including hydrological and biogeochemical cycles as well as cryosphere-ocean systems. [12] [14] [15] She is currently working on Phase II of the project that is expected to be completed by 2021. [16]

Professional service and membership

Leung is an editor of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Hydrometeorology [17] and the American Geophysical Union's Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmosphere. [18] She is co-chair of the Science Advisory Board Climate Working Group at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). [19] She is also a member of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Research Applications Board [20] and the Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee (BERAC). [21] In the past, she served on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (BASC) [22] and was a member of the Science Steering Committee for the Community Earth System Models. [23]

Workshops

As a part of BERAC, Leung organized a workshop entitled 'Second Atmospheric River Tracking Method Inter-comparison Project' where participants from the U.S. Federal Agencies, national laboratories, and U.S. and international universities attended. [24] The workshop provided guidance on utilizing algorithms to understand the uncertainties of atmospheric river science. [25] [26] She has also organized several workshops and seminars sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), [27] DOE, [28] NOAA [29] and National Science Foundation (NSF). [30]

Awards and recognitions

Leung has been recognized in multiple national organizations. Her research on climate change has been featured in major news publications including Science, Popular Science, Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio among others. [1] Some of her achievements are listed below:

Publications

Leung has published over 250 peer-reviewed journal articles. [27] Her most cited articles include research on climate modeling and the effects of climate change.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Climate model</span> Quantitative methods used to simulate climate

Numerical climate models are mathematical models that can simulate the interactions of important drivers of climate. These drivers are the atmosphere, oceans, land surface and ice. Scientists use climate models to study the dynamics of the climate system and to make projections of future climate and of climate change. Climate models can also be qualitative models and contain narratives, largely descriptive, of possible futures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rafael L. Bras</span> Puerto Rican civil engineer

Rafael Luis Bras is a Puerto Rican civil engineer best known for his contributions in surface hydrology and hydrometeorology, including his work in soil-vegetation-atmosphere system modeling.

Carmen Nicole Moelders is an American atmospheric scientist. Her work is mainly focused on hydrometeorology, mesoscale meteorology, cloud physics, land-atmosphere interaction, air pollution, wildfire modeling, and wind power modeling.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inez Fung</span> American climatologist (born 1949)

Inez Fung is a professor of atmospheric science at the University of California, Berkeley, jointly appointed in the department of earth and planetary science and the department of environmental science, policy and management. She is also the co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atmospheric river</span> Narrow corridor of concentrated moisture in the atmosphere

An atmospheric river (AR) is a narrow corridor or filament of concentrated moisture in the atmosphere. Other names for this phenomenon are tropical plume, tropical connection, moisture plume, water vapor surge, and cloud band.

The Community Earth System Model (CESM) is a fully coupled numerical simulation of the Earth system consisting of atmospheric, ocean, ice, land surface, carbon cycle, and other components. CESM includes a climate model providing state-of-art simulations of the Earth's past, present, and future. It is the successor of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), specifically version 4 (CCSMv4), which provided the initial atmospheric component for CESM. Strong ensemble forecasting capabilities, CESM-LE, were developed at the onset to control for error and biases across different model runs (realizations). Simulations from the Earth's surface through the thermosphere are generated utilizing the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM). CESM1 was released in 2010 with primary development by the Climate and Global Dynamics Division (CGD) of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and significant funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DoE).

Rong Fu is a Chinese-American climatologist, meteorologist, researcher, professor, and published author with more than 100 articles, books, and projects detailing changes that occur in Earth's atmosphere and how they affect climate, seasons, rainfall, and the like. Fu has been invited to present over 115 presentations and seminars, and has administered more than 32 projects that received over 11 million dollars in funding. The focus areas of Fu's research are convection; cloud and precipitation processes and their role in climate; atmospheric transport in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere; the interaction between the atmosphere and ocean and terrestrial vegetation; satellite remote sensing applications and retrievals; the interaction between rainfall rates and the rainforest in regions of the Amazon rainforest; and drought prediction in states across the United States, including California and Texas. She is currently a professor in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department at UCLA and the associate director of UCLA's Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering. She is also an adjunct professor in the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin.

CICE is a computer model that simulates the growth, melt and movement of sea ice. It has been integrated into many coupled climate system models as well as global ocean and weather forecasting models and is often used as a tool in Arctic and Southern Ocean research. CICE development began in the mid-1990s by the United States Department of Energy (DOE), and it is currently maintained and developed by a group of institutions in North America and Europe known as the CICE Consortium. Its widespread use in Earth system science in part owes to the importance of sea ice in determining Earth's planetary albedo, the strength of the global thermohaline circulation in the world's oceans, and in providing surface boundary conditions for atmospheric circulation models, since sea ice occupies a significant proportion (4-6%) of Earth's surface. CICE is a type of cryospheric model.

Amy C. Clement is an atmospheric and marine scientist studying and modeling global climate change at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science.

Arlene M. Fiore is an atmospheric chemist whose research focuses on issues surrounding air quality and climate change.

Shian-Jiann Lin is a Taiwanese-American atmospheric scientist and meteorologist. He is currently the head of the Weather and Climate Dynamics Division at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the lead developer of the GFDL Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere Dynamical Core (FV3). and a lead developer or key contributor to several weather and climate models developed using FV3.

Sonia Maria Kreidenweis is an American Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University. Her research considers aerosols and their impact on weather and the climate. She has previously served as President of the American Association for Aerosol Research and was a board member of the American Meteorological Society. She was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2019.

Gretchen Keppel-Aleks is an American scientist and assistant professor at the University of Michigan in the College of Engineering's department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering. She primarily focuses on Earth's climate and the effects of greenhouse gasses on Earth's atmosphere. Keppel-Aleks has been named a Kavli Fellow by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katherine Calvin</span> American earth scientist

Katherine Calvin is NASA's Chief Scientist and Senior Climate Advisor. In July 2023, she was elected co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III. As an earth scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute (JGCRI), she has researched human use of global resources using Earth modeling systems at JGCRI under the direction of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and the University of Maryland. She has contributed to the third US National Climate Assessment as well as two special reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joellen Louise Russell</span> American oceanographer and climate scientist

Joellen Louise Russell is an American oceanographer and climate scientist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Ka Ming Lau</span> Chinese-American scientist

William Ka Ming Lau is a senior scientist at the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, a research center at the University of Maryland and an adjunct professor of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Maryland. A physicist by training, his research spans over 4 decades covering a wide range of topics in climate dynamics, tropical meteorology, ocean-atmosphere coupling, aerosol-water cycle interactions, and climate variability and change. Lau conducted pioneering research on atmospheric teleconnection, and the global monsoon climate system. He discovered the aerosol-monsoon regional feedback mechanism, i.e., the Elevated Heat Pump (EHP) effect that strongly modulate climate change in Asian monsoon regions. He was the senior author of a popular research reference book, “Intraseasonal Variability in the Atmosphere-Ocean Climate System”. As of November 2020, he has coauthored 297 refereed papers, with total citation = 33,932, h-index=101.

Natalie Mahowald is an American Earth scientist who is the Irving Porter Church Professor of Engineering at Cornell University. Her research considers atmospheric transport of biogeochemically-relevant species, and the impact of humans on their environments.

Christa Peters-Lidard is an American hydrologist known for her work on integrating land surface modeling and data assimilation, particularly with remotely sensed measurements of precipitation.

Marika Holland is a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research known for her work on modeling sea ice and its role in the global climate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anna Michalak</span> American geophysicist

Anna Michalak is an American geophysicist who is Director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a professor at Stanford University. Her research considers the cycling and emission of greenhouse gases. She is the lead author of the carbon cycle science plan, a comprehensive analysis of Earth's carbon stocks and flows. She was awarded the 2021 American Geophysical Union Joanne Simpson Medal.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "DOE Pulse". web.ornl.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
  2. 1 2 3 "PNNL: News - Six PNNL scientists elected AAAS fellows". www.pnnl.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-08.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "PNNL: News - PNNL scientist Ruby Leung appointed a Battelle Fellow". www.pnnl.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
  4. ↑ Leung, Lai-Yung; North, Gerald R. (1991-08-01). "Atmospheric Variability on a Zonally Symmetric Land Planet". Journal of Climate. 4 (8): 753–765. Bibcode:1991JCli....4..753L. doi: 10.1175/1520-0442(1991)004<0753:avoazs>2.0.co;2 . ISSN   0894-8755.
  5. ↑ Lin, R. Q.; Kreiss, H.; Kuang, W. J.; Leung, L. Y. (1991-07-01). "A study of long-term climate change in a simple seasonal nonlinear climate model". Climate Dynamics. 6 (1): 35–41. Bibcode:1991ClDy....6...35L. doi:10.1007/BF00210580. ISSN   1432-0894. S2CID   128704324.
  6. ↑ "PNNL: Soot + Snow = Climate Change". www.pnnl.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-07.
  7. ↑ "Powerful hurricanes strengthen faster now than 30 years ago". phys.org. Retrieved 2019-05-09.
  8. ↑ "PNNL: News - Powerful hurricanes strengthen faster now than 30 years ago". www.pnnl.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-09.
  9. ↑ "PNNL: Researchers Contribute to Nobel Peace Prize for Climate Change Awareness". www.pnnl.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
  10. ↑ "PNNL: News - PNNL scientists contribute to Nobel Prize-winning IPCC". www.pnnl.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
  11. ↑ "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change". The Nobel Peace Prize. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
  12. 1 2 "Ruby Leung Appointed to ACME Chief Climate Scientist | Earth and Environmental System Modeling". climatemodeling.science.energy.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-09.
  13. ↑ "The Leadership Team". E3SM - Energy Exascale Earth System Model. Retrieved 2019-05-10.
  14. 1 2 3 "How to fit a planet inside a computer—developing the energy exascale earth system model". phys.org. Retrieved 2019-05-10.
  15. ↑ "Energy Exascale Earth System Model | Earth and Environmental System Modeling". climatemodeling.science.energy.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-09.
  16. ↑ "E3SM: The Energy Exascale Earth System Model Phase 2, (2018-2021) | Earth and Environmental System Modeling". climatemodeling.science.energy.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
  17. ↑ "Journal of Hydrometeorology". American Meteorological Society. Retrieved 2019-05-06.
  18. ↑ "Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres". agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com. doi:10.1002/(ISSN)2169-8996 . Retrieved 2019-05-06.
  19. ↑ "CWG Members". sab.noaa.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-06.
  20. ↑ "WRF Research Applications Board (RAB) | MMM: Mesoscale & Microscale Meteorology Laboratory". www.mmm.ucar.edu. Retrieved 2019-05-09.
  21. ↑ "PNNL: L. Ruby Leung Appointed to Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee". www.pnnl.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-09.
  22. ↑ "Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate - basc". dels.nas.edu. Retrieved 2019-05-06.
  23. ↑ "CESM Administration | SSC Members". www.cesm.ucar.edu. Retrieved 2019-05-06.
  24. ↑ "Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee (BERAC)". U.S. Department of Energy |Office of Science. Retrieved 5 May 2019.
  25. ↑ "CW3E Publication Notice: Atmospheric River Tracking Method Intercomparison Project (ARTMIP): Project Goals and Experimental Design – Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes" . Retrieved 2019-05-10.
  26. ↑ Nguyen, Phu; Magnusdottir, Gudrun; Krishnan, Harinarayan; Collow, Allison; Prabhat; Lavers, David; Wilson, Anna; Wick, Gary; Walton, Daniel (2018-06-20). "Atmospheric River Tracking Method Intercomparison Project (ARTMIP): project goals and experimental design". Geoscientific Model Development. 11 (6): 2455–2474. Bibcode:2018GMD....11.2455S. doi: 10.5194/gmd-11-2455-2018 . ISSN   1991-959X.
  27. 1 2 "Center for Climate Sciences". Center for Climate Sciences. Retrieved 2019-05-07.
  28. ↑ "Community Modeling and Long-Term Predictions of Integrated Water Cycles" (PDF). U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. September 2012.
  29. ↑ "Participants". www.cpo.noaa.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-08.
  30. ↑ "CESM Workshops: 2012 LMWG Workshop Presentations". www.cesm.ucar.edu. Retrieved 2019-05-08.
  31. ↑ "Leung". Honors Program. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
  32. ↑ "PNNL: News - PNNL scientist elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union". www.pnnl.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-12.
  33. ↑ "PNNL: L. Ruby Leung elected AMS Fellow". www.pnnl.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
  34. ↑ "List of Fellows". American Meteorological Society. Retrieved 2019-05-12.
  35. ↑ "Historic Fellows". American Association for the Advancement of Science. Retrieved 2019-05-12.
  36. ↑ "PNNL: Ruby Leung Elected AAAS Fellow". www.pnnl.gov. Retrieved 2019-05-12.
  37. ↑ "Two PNNL researchers elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering". BIOENGINEER.ORG. 2017-02-14. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
  38. ↑ "Dr. Ruby Leung". NAE Website. Retrieved 2019-05-12.
  39. ↑ admin. "Member Directory". Washington State Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 2019-05-12.
  40. ↑ Herald, The Tri-city. "PNNL scientists join Washington State Academy of Sciences". tri-cityherald. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
  41. ↑ "International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces 2002". The Interaction Design Foundation. Retrieved 2019-05-06.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.