CLDERA brings together a diverse group of experts in climate modeling, atmospheric and computational science, uncertainty quantification, optimization, machine learning, spatiotemporal statistics, and remote sensing data analysis from across four divisions and nine centers. Team members are leading experts in their fields who also have a proven record of interdisciplinary research.
Sandia Leadership
Director, Climate Change Security
Robert Leland
Director, Climate Change Security
As director of the Climate Change Security Center at Sandia, Rob leads climate-strategy development across the Labs, directs the Earth Sciences Research Foundation, and oversees laboratory and field work in New Mexico, Texas, and Alaska. The Center includes Sandia’s Renewable Energy and Earth Sciences research groups. Rob also serves as program area director for the Renewable and Fossil Energy Program within Sandia’s Energy and Homeland Security Portfolio, and lead for Office of Science programs in climate and geosciences.
Co-Project Manager
Ben Cook
Co-Project Manager
As senior manager of the Geoscience Research and Applications Group at Sandia, Ben provides leadership and management direction for Sandia’s earth science research and development (R&D) programs. Ben oversees six departments with over 100 researchers engaged in lab and field research spanning subsurface geophysics to stratospheric atmospheric science. He leads Sandia’s energy and climate programs funded by DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management and Office of Science’s Biological and Environmental Research. Ben also leads Sandia’s Arctic research initiative, including North Slope operations in Alaska. As a co-project manager, Ben will help the team partner with Sandia program leads to engage government stakeholders, positioning CLDERA for robust follow-on funding.
Co-Project Manager
Andrew Salinger
Co-Project Manager
Andy has been part of the E3SM project leadership team since the project began in 2014, now leading the sub-project for software and algorithm developments. He led the affiliated E3SM Software Modernization project (BER, FY17-19, $5M/year) to elevate the computational science aspects of E3SM. He has been integral to the building of Sandia’s current Office of Science program in Earth system modeling, both in funding and staffing. Andy will manage relationships with the broader DOE Labs Earth system modeling community and the Office of Science BER and ASCR programs.
Principal Investigator
Diana Bull
Principal Investigator
Climate-related research has been a passion of Diana’s for over two decades, with work spanning private industry, academia, and now Sandia. At Sandia, her career began in the water power program as the wave energy converter modeling lead. She is the principal investigator of the Arctic Coastal Erosion (ACE) Model, a multi-disciplinary pursuit to model permafrost erosion, and institutional lead on the BER-funded InteRFACE project continuing to develop ACE. She was a primary technical contributor to Sandia’s lab-wide Climate Security Strategy, drawing upon years of strategic foresight development surrounding the Arctic, climate, and climate intervention.
Deputy-Primary Investigator
Kara Peterson
Deputy-Primary Investigator
Kara has expertise in computational modeling, discretization methods for PDEs, and high-performance computing, with research interests in climate modeling and Arctic systems. As principal investigator of the Arctic Tipping Points LDRD project, her team formed the nascent team for CLDERA and provided technical approaches for the simulated pathways. She is also involved in DOE SciDAC projects, including the Discrete Element for Sea Ice (DEMSI) project as Sandia-PI and model developer and the Coupling Approaches for Next Generation Architectures (CANGA) project.
Simulation Pathway Lead
Irina Tezaur
Simulation Pathway Lead
Irina is a 2019 Presidential Early Career Award recipient. She is an expert in reduced-order modeling and multi-scale modeling and simulation on advanced HPC platforms. Irina’s experience within the climate domain includes her role as a lead developer of the MPAS-Albany Land Ice (MALI) model developed under the ProSPect and PISCEES SciDAC projects (the land-ice component of the E3SM), her leadership role on the precursor project (Aeras) to the SCREAM atmospheric model, and her contributions to the Arctic Coastal Erosion (ACE) model currently under development as part of the BER-funded InteRFACE project.
Observation Pathway Lead
Lyndsay Shand
Observation Pathway Lead
Lyndsay has expertise in spatial and spatio-temporal statistics, point process models, Bayesian hierarchical models, and statistical methods for remotely-sensed data, atmospheric, and climate applications. For the past eight years, she has developed space-time statistical methods for observational environmental and climate data. As principal investigator of Sandia’s first Marine Cloud Brightening LDRD, her interdisciplinary team developed data-driven methods to understand the local impacts of ship emissions. Lyndsay is also a key contributor to Sandia’s Climate Security Strategy and holds an adjunct faculty position in the Department of Statistics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Attribution Lead
Laura Painton Swiler
Attribution Lead
Laura has had a 27-year career at Sandia focused on developing and deploying uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods across many mission areas. Her research interests include uncertainty and sensitivity analysis of computational models, design of computer experiments, parameter calibration, adaptive sampling algorithms, Bayesian inference, and surrogate models. She has applied UQ methods to nuclear reactors (NEAMS), nuclear waste disposal (Geologic Disposal Safety Assessment), cyber (SECURE GC), additive manufacturing (Born Qualified GC), and now climate with CLDERA. She is also a Dakota developer.
External Collaborators
Professor Christiane Jablonowski
University of Michigan, Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering
cjablono@umich.edu
Christiane’s website
Professor Bo Li
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Department of Statistics
libo@illinois.edu
Bo’s website
Professor Xiaohong Liu
Texas A&M University, Department of Atmospheric Sciences
Xiaohong’s website
Kate Marvel
Columbia University, Center for Climate Systems Research with a joint appointment at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
kdm2144@columbia.edu
Kate’s website