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 remain challenging. In this lecture, I will discuss some recent advances in modeling extreme events and their future changes. Using a combination of modeling approaches, I will provide examples of projections of future changes in flood-producing winter storms and their characteristics, mesoscale convective systems that produce wind damages and floods, the risk of landfalling hurricanes, and changes in heatwaves and wildfires. These projections underscore the need for adaptation planning for a weather and climate resilient society.
Speaker Bio:
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, water cycle, and extreme events.
Ruby is the Chief Scientist of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM), a major effort involving over a hundred 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. She is also 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 received a BS in Physics and Statistics from Chinese University of Hong Kong and an MS and PhD in Atmospheric Sciences from Texas A&M University. Ruby has published over 550 papers in peer-reviewed journals.