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L. Ruby Leung, PhD
Battelle Fellow and Chief Scientist, Earth Sciences
L. Ruby Leung, PhD
Battelle Fellow and Chief Scientist, Earth Sciences
Biography
The climate—tropical here, arctic there—develops on long time scales and over big areas (half a continent, maybe, or the poles). But the processes that make the climate are mostly air, ice, and other molecules banging around thanks to the heat provided by the sun. Sometimes those processes create bright puffy clouds, others an atmospheric river, that much like its terrestrial counterpart, funnels water across large distances. The atmosphere is big, and we need high-resolution models to understand it. As chief scientist of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model Team (or E3SM), Ruby Leung has been leading efforts to re-create the Earth's atmosphere in great detail.
Simulating the atmosphere is like taking a picture: the smaller the pixels, the more in focus your view is. Most computer simulations of Earth's atmosphere have pixels 100-kilometers on a side. Since clouds are usually a few kilometers in length, the clouds wouldn't even look like clouds—just smears of white, figuratively speaking. Leung is on track to get the resolution down to three kilometers instead of one hundred. She also aims to include a really important process: humans.
"We have some specific questions. Our use of fossil energy, how would that affect the earth system in the future? And then, at the same time, how would changes in the Earth system affect how we might be able to produce energy?" said Leung. "In order to address these types of questions, we need to include human activities in our model."
An affiliate scientist at Boulder's National Center for Atmospheric Research, Leung is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Washington State Academy of Sciences, and is active in the American Meteorological Society. She received the Bert Bolin Global Environmental Change Award from the American Geophysical Union. Her expertise on climate change impacts has been featured in Science, Popular Science, Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and many other major newspapers.