BER Supported Climate Modeler Elected to National Academy of Engineering

Summary

The National Academy of Engineering has elected Dr. Warren Washington, a climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), to its membership. Washington, who heads NCAR’s Climate Change Research Section, was honored with membership to the prestigious society “for pioneering the development of coupled climate models, their use on parallel supercomputing architectures, and their interpretation.” For over 20 years, Washington’s group at NCAR has used coupled climate models to estimate the effects of increasing greenhouse gases. The BER Climate Change Prediction Program and its predecessors have been primary sponsors of Washington’s research, much of which was done in collaboration with several DOE National Laboratories. “At the beginning of this effort, the components of the climate models were fairly simple, compared to today’s state-of-the-art climate models,” says Washington. To keep up with the models’ increasing complexity and growing need for computing speed, Washington has more recently led an effort to apply parallel supercomputing architectures, in which multiple processors perform many calculations simultaneously, to climate change projections.