Numerical climate models use quantitative methods to simulate the interactions of the important drivers of climate, including atmosphere, oceans, land surface and ice. They are used for a variety of purposes from study of the dynamics of the climate system to projections of future climate. Climate models may also be qualitative models and also narratives, largely descriptive, of possible futures.
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.
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.
An atmospheric river (AR) is a narrow corridor or filament of concentrated moisture (hydrosphere) in the atmosphere. Other names for this phenomenon are tropical plume, tropical connection, moisture plume, water vapor surge, and cloud band.
Michael Ghil is an American and European mathematician and physicist, focusing on the climate sciences and their interdisciplinary aspects. He is a founder of theoretical climate dynamics, as well as of advanced data assimilation methodology. He has systematically applied dynamical systems theory to planetary-scale flows, both atmospheric and oceanic. Ghil has used these methods to proceed from simple flows with high temporal regularity and spatial symmetry to the observed flows, with their complex behavior in space and time. His studies of climate variability on many time scales have used a full hierarchy of models, from the simplest ‘toy’ models all the way to atmospheric, oceanic and coupled general circulation models. Recently, Ghil has also worked on modeling and data analysis in population dynamics, macroeconomics, and the climate–economy–biosphere system.
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.
Arlene M. Fiore is an atmospheric chemist whose research focuses on issues surrounding air quality and climate change.
Maura E. Hagan is a Professor of Physics and Dean of the College of Science at Utah State University. She is a Fellow of both the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union, and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.
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.
Katherine Calvin is an earth scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute (JGCRI). She researches 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).
Joellen Louise Russell is an American oceanographer and climate 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.
Joyce Penner is an atmospheric scientist known for her research on climate change, especially on the impact of aerosols and clouds.
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.
