EPS Colloquium – Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory/Department of Energy, Richland, Washington
Modeling Extreme Events and Their Future Changes
Some of the most consequential outcomes of global warming for societies and ecosystems are changes in extreme events. Comparing 2000-2019 with 1980-1999, extreme temperature and flood events have more than doubled globally while the number of disastrous storms and droughts has increased by 30-50%. While the nonlinear increase in latent energy with warmer surface air temperature may explain the global increasing trends in weather extremes, credible projections of the regional changes in extreme events and changes in different types of extreme events remain challenging, partly because of model limitations in simulating the extreme events. In this seminar, I will discuss some recent advances in modeling extreme events and their future changes, including examples of modeling mesoscale convective systems, atmospheric rivers, and hurricanes, and connecting future storm changes to changes in the storm environments.
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L. Ruby Leung is a Battelle Fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Her research broadly cuts across multiple areas in modeling and analysis of climate and water cycle including orographic precipitation, monsoon climate, extreme events, land surface processes, land-atmosphere interactions, and aerosol-cloud interactions. Ruby is the Chief Scientist of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM), an effort involving over 100 earth and computational scientists and applied mathematicians to develop state-of-the-art capabilities for modeling human-Earth system processes on DOE’s next generation high performance computers.
Ruby is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and Washington State Academy of Sciences and 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 AGU Global Environmental Change Bert Bolin Award and Lecture in 2019, the AGU Atmospheric Science Jacob Bjerknes Lecture in 2020, and the AMS Hydrologic Sciences Medal in 2022. She was awarded the DOE Distinguished Scientist Fellow in 2021. She has published over 450 papers in peer-reviewed journals.