Delphine Deryng

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Postdoctoral Scholar, Computation Institute, University of Chicago

Adjunct Research Scientist, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies & Columbia University Center for Climate Systems Research

 

Areas of Expertise:

  • Agricultural systems and climate change
  • Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability
  • The water-energy-food nexus
  • Modeling uncertainty and robust decision making

Delphine Deryng's research deals with global environmental change issues with a particular interest in agricultural systems and implications for food security. She develops and uses process-based crop modeling tools to explore the interaction between climate, crops and land use decision. She conducts multiple research activities as part of the AgMIP Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison (GGCMI) initiative exploring the role of extreme weather events on global crop yield and better understanding the effects of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations on crop water productivity. In addition, she currently leads the first Regional Gridded Crop Modeling Activity (RGCMA) to assess the potential impacts of irrigated crop production on ground water resources in India under climate change using an ensemble of gridded models and regional climate and agricultural datasets.

Prior joining RDCEP, Delphine worked on southern Africa’s hydro-economy and water security as a Research Associate at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics (2014-2015).

Delphine holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences from the University of East Anglia (2014) and a Masters in Geography from McGill University (2009). She joined the Computation Institute in November 2015.

Research Projects

AgGRID | InterSectoral Impacts Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (ISI-MIP) | The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) | The Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison

Selected Publications

  • Deryng D, Elliott J et al. (in review, submitted to Nature Climate Change) “Regional disparities in the beneficial effects of rising CO2 emissions on crop water productivity”
  • Conway D, Archer E, Deryng D et al. (2015) “Climate and Southern Africa’s water-energy-food nexus”, Nature Climate Change 5, 837–846 (2015) doi:10.1038/nclimate2735
  • Deryng D (2014) “Climate change impacts on crop productivity in global semi-arid areas and selected semi-arid economies”, working paper, Overseas Development Institute (ODI), London
  • Deryng D, Conway D, Ramankutty N et al. (2014) “Global crop yield response to extreme heat stress under multiple climate change futures”, Environmental Research Letters, 9, 034011, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/9/3/034011
  • Rosenzweig C, Elliott J, Deryng D et al. (2014) “Assessing agricultural risks of climate change in the 21st century in a global gridded crop model intercomparison”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(9), pp.3268–3273. doi:10.1073/pnas.1222463110
  • Elliott J, Deryng D et al. (2014) “Constraints and potentials of future irrigation water availability on agricultural production under climate change”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(9), pp.3239–3244. doi:10.1073/pnas.1222474110
  • Deryng D, Sacks, WJ, Barford CC, and Ramankutty N (2011) “Simulating the effects of climate and land management practices on global crop yield”, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 25(2), doi:10.1029/2009GB003765

 


 

Severin Thaler

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Graduate Student, Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago

 

 

 

Severin Thaler received a MSc in Mathematics from ETH Zurich with a focus on Numerical Analysis and is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He is contributing to the implementation of a platform allowing storage, analysis, and visualization of large-scale climate data with the goal of raising awareness on climate change and ultimately to convince policy-makers.

Research Interests:

  • Spatio-Temporal Databases
  • Distributed Systems
  • Machine Learning
  • Climate Analysis

Current Projects: EDE

 

Shanshan Sun

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Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago

Sun’s current research focuses on studying the transient climate behaviors and the physical mechanisms governing them using both state-of-the-art General Circulation Models (GCMs) and one-column models which are computationally efficient. She also maintains and helps build the library of transient climates from GCM outputs.

Sun received her PhD from University of Connecticut in 2012.

Research Interests:

  • Transient climate evolutions and its potential causes
  • Land-atmosphere interaction
  • Ocean-atmosphere interaction and its impacts on land-atmosphere interaction
  • Dynamic vegetation’s role in the climate system

Research Projects:

Soil Moisture | Climate Variability: statistics and observation based simulations | Shadowing | Climate variability: effect of model spatial resolution

Michael Glotter

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Researcher, RDCEP

AAAS Fellow, Office of US Senator Al Franken

Recent publications
Joshua Elliott et al. The parallel system for integrating impact models and sectors (pSIMS). Proceedings of XSEDE '13: Gateway to Discovery. 2013; (Article No. 21).
J. Elliott et al. The global gridded crop model intercomparison: data and modeling protocols for phase 1 (v1.0). Geoscientific Model Development, 8(2):261–277, 2015.
Joshua Elliott et al. "Predicting Agricultural Impacts of Large-Scale Drought: 2012 and the Case for Better Modeling" (2013). RDCEP Working Paper Series No. 13-01.
F Ewert et al. Uncertainties in scaling-up crop models for large-area climate change impact assessments. Handbook of Climate Change and Agroecosystems, 2015
Michael Glotter et al. "A simple carbon cycle representation for economic & policy analyses." Working Paper 13-04, Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy, September 2013.
Michael J Glotter et al. A simple carbon cycle representation for economic and policy analyses. Climatic Change, 126(3- 4):319–335, 2014.
Michael Glotter et al. "Evaluating the utility of dynamical downscaling in agricultural impacts projections." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 24 (2014): 8776-8781.
Michael Glotter et al. Evaluating the utility of dynamical downscaling in agricultural impacts projections. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24):8776–8781, 2014.
Michael J. Glotter, et al. Evaluating the sensitivity of agricultural model performance to different climate inputs. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 55(3):579–594, 2016.
Elisabeth Moyer et al. "Climate impacts on economic growth as drivers of uncertainty in the social cost of carbon." University of Chicago Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Paper 652 (2013).
E J Moyer, M D Woolley, N J Matteson, M J Glotter, and D A Weisbach. Climate impacts on economic growth as drivers of uncertainty in the social cost of carbon. The Journal of Legal Studies, 2014
Elisabeth J. Moyer et al. "Climate Impacts on Economic Growth as Drivers of Uncertainty in the Social Cost of Carbon. " The Journal of Legal Studies 43, no. 2 (2014).
Joshua Elliott et al. "Constraints and potentials of future irrigation water availability on agricultural production under climate change." PNAS 111, no. 9 (2014): 3239-3244.
Joshua Elliott et al. The parallel system for integrating impact models and sectors (psims). Environmental Modelling & Software, 62:509–516, 2014.
Joshua Elliott et al. "A spatial modeling framework to evaluate domestic biofuel-induced potential land use changes and emissions." Environmental science & technology 48, no. 4 (2014): 2488-2496.

Andrew Poppick

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Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics, Carleton College

 

 

 

Poppick’s research pertains to climate variability, changes thereof, and simulating transient climates, with a focus on statistical methods for non-stationary processes. He received a PhD in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago, from which he also received a BA in statistics.

Raymond Pierrehumbert

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Louis Block Professor, Department of the Geophysical Sciences

University of Chicago

Areas of Expertise:

  • Climate change, climate simulation
  • Mars: Climate

Pierrehumbert studies the physics of climate, especially regarding the long-term evolution of the climates of Earth and Mars. Previously, he directed the Climate Systems Center, which was established with a $3.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop software for rapidly conducting advanced climate simulations. Pierrehumbert was an author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report (1997-2001). He also was a member of the National Research Council's Panel on Abrupt Climate Change and its Societal Impacts (2000-2001), and currently serves on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Panel on abrupt change. Pierrehumbert was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 1996-1997.

Research Projects

Social cost of carbon

Laura Zamboni

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Research Scientist

Computation Institute

University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory

My main research interest is the understanding of rainfall variability from seasonal to longer time scale. I am also interested in improving the characterization of rainfall variability and extreme weather events target to "real life applications" as for example energy and agricultural demands, and human health. The means to achieve such understanding include observational datasets as well as climate models, including the investigation of single processes affecting the simulated climate.

Currently, I am working on the uncertainty quantification of simulated rainfall due to uncertainties in the representation physical processes governing cloud formation and evolution. These physical processes occur at spatial and temporal scales not resolved by general circulation atmospheric models (AGCMs) and are a major source of uncertainty in explorations of natural climate variability, seasonal predictions and climate change assessments.

I am at present analyzing a large ensemble of present-day AMIP-type perturbed physics experiments I generated using the Geophysical Fluid Dynamic Laboratory (GFDL) High Resolution Atmospheric Model (HiRAM) on the Argonne Leadership Computational Facility. Simulations are performed over the entire globe at 100 Km resolution, which is outstandingly high for this type of studies. 

The project is conducted in collaboration with R. Jacob (ANL), R. V. Kotamarthi (ANL) and T. Williams (ANL), Maria Cadeddu (ANL), I. Held (GFDL), M. Zhao (GFDL), D. Neelin, and J. McWilliams (UCLA).

Two secondary projects focus on South American climate: The first project's goal is to investigate the interannual and inter-decadal variability of precipitation in South America and their relationship to ENSO flavors. The analysis is based on examination of atmospheric and coupled general circulation models, as well as observations. The second project's goal is to characterize heat waves in South America and their link to the general circulation.

Research Projects

Precipitation Physics in Climate Models