GFDL Statistical Downscaling Research Team Members & Collaborators

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GFDL Statistical Downscaling Research Team Members & Collaborators

Former team members and past collaborators

NOAA GFDL federal employees:

Keith Dixon, NOAA/GFDL – Team Lead
Keith’s research focuses on the use of state-of-the-art computer models to simulate the global climate and connecting those model results to applications relevant to adaptation and planning. His interest in statistical downscaling stems from a desire to assess the capabilities of climate models and downscaling methods. Keith also is active in the science communications arena, seeking to enhance the exchange of scientifically credible information between the realms of large-scale climate research and relevant local-scale impacts and applications.

Keith’s GFDL webpage

Liqiang Sun, NOAA/GFDL
Liqiang’s research activities are focused on regional climate modeling and downscaling, understanding regional climate variability across time scales, and improving climate predictions and projections. He also has fifteen years of experience in real-time climate forecasting and verification. Prior to joining the GFDL team, for more than twelve years Liqiang was part of the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies and served as the deputy science lead for the National Climate Assessment Technical Support Unit.

SAIC contract staff:

Nicole Zenes, SAIC at NOAA/GFDL
Nickie joined the ESD team in July 2023. She joined us after receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Utah where she studied how drought and climate change affect forest ecosystems. Her undergraduate degree is from Princeton University. In her scientific programmer role, Nickie makes use of her R programming skills and research experience to advance the team’s capabilities to develop well-designed experiments and conduct appropriate analyses reliably.

Princeton University CIMES:

Postdoctoral Research Associate:

Weixuan (Rosa) Xu, Princeton University’s Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System (CIMES)
Rosa officially joined our team in September 2024 as part of our Downscaling Climate Projections for Heat and Health Applications project. Rosa completed her Ph.D. at Brown University in 2023, conducting research focusing on climate modeling and climate dynamics. She then worked for a year at McKinsey & Company as a climate scientist involved in climate resilience analytics, risk assessment analyses and communicating science-based results to business clients. Rosa’s knowledge and experiences in climate science, risk assessment, and climate services benefit the team’s research-to-services (R2S) efforts.

UCAR CPAESS postdoc:

Postdoctoral Researcher:

Graham Taylor, UCAR CPAESS at NOAA/GFDL
Graham joined our team in October 2024 as part of the multi-institutional Fit for Purpose research project. Graham completed his Ph.D. at Portland State University in 2024, where he researched how climate change may affect weather in western North America, especially related to large-scale atmospheric circulation and wildfire. Graham’s experience with evaluating and analyzing large datasets of climate models will benefit the project’s goals of determining which methods of creating high resolution climate projections are suitable for different use cases.

NOAA GFDL federal collaborator:

John Lanzante, NOAA/GFDL
John is a member of GFDL’s Weather and Climate Dynamics Division who affiliates with our team on certain projects. His work involves the use of statistics and data analysis techniques as applied to both observed and model (GCM) generated data. Recently, John has been focusing on the representation of climate extremes (i.e., the tails of the distribution) in bias corrected and statistical downscaled data products generated by different techniques.

John’s GFDL webpage

Other Internal Research Collaborators at NOAA-GFDL & Princeton

MARINE ECOSYSTEMS FOCUS:
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CURRENT:
Charles Stock, NOAA/GFDL
Andrew Ross NOAA/GFDL

Liz Drenkard, NOAA/GFDL

Vimal Koul Princeton Univ/CIMES

Members of GFDL’s ESD Team collaborate with Charlie Stock and others in GFDL’s Marine Ecosystems and Downscaling Division on the bias correction and statistical downscaling of surface climate variables for use in marine resource impacts applications. To date, this work has focused on multi-decadal projections as well as sub-seasonal to seasonal forecasts.

♦ Drenkard, E. J., C. Stock, A. C. Ross, K. W. Dixon, and Coauthors, 2021: Next-generation regional ocean projections for living marine resource management in a changing climate. ICES Journal of Marine Science, fsab100, https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsab100.
♦ Ross, A. C., C. A. Stock, D. Adams-Smith, K. W. Dixon, K. L. Findell, V. S. Saba, and B. Vogt, 2020: Estuarine Forecasts at Daily Weather to Subseasonal Time Scales. Earth and Space Science, doi: 10.1029/2020EA001179.
♦ Muhling, B. A., C. F. Gaitán, C. A. Stock, V. S. Saba, D. Tommasi, and K. W. Dixon, 2017: Potential Salinity and Temperature Futures for the Chesapeake Bay Using a Statistical Downscaling Spatial Disaggregation Framework. Estuaries and Coasts, doi:10.1007/s12237-017-0280-8.
♦ Muhling, B. A., J. Jacobs, C. A. Stock, C. F. Gaitan, and V. S. Saba, 2017: Projections of the future occurrence, distribution, and seasonality of three Vibrio species in the Chesapeake Bay under a high-emission climate change scenario: Vibrio and Climate in the Chesapeake Bay. GeoHealth, doi:10.1002/2017GH000089.

Our Other Collaborators

Ellen Mecray, NOAA Regional Climate Services Director, Eastern Region
Ellen focuses on how to make the climate data and information coming out of various parts of NOAA useful, useable, and used by a broad range of stakeholders. Ellen’s knowledge about what customers want from NOAA in terms of climate services, and her efforts to work within NOAA to figure out how best to be responsive to those needs, meshes with the aspect of the GFDL ESD Team’s research efforts that can promote better informed use of such data products in climate impacts studies. The use of downscaled climate projections for applied research into the effects of heat on human health is a topic of mutual interest.

Hunter Jones, NOAA/CPO
Hunter Jones is the program manager and lead of the Climate Program Office’s Extreme Heat Climate Risk Area. Hunter fosters and manages connections between scientists and stakeholders, with a very specific focus on the health risk of heat in urban environments. He is a principal for the interagency National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS).