CLIMATE SCIENCES

The Climate Sciences Department is the newest Earth and Environmental Sciences Area’s Department, founded in April 2007, and now has more than 100 scientific staff members. Through the Department’s ongoing contributions toward DOE’s strategic mission, and its success in attracting top talent pursuing tightly focused research goals, Berkeley Lab is recognized as one of the U.S. DOE’s National Laboratories (see FY2015 DOE Strategic Plan) with core competency in Climate Change Science.

Biraud,Sebastien - Dr. Biraud leads the Climate Sciences Department in the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division (CESD). He is the Principal Investigator of the DOE-supported Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Carbon Project, Airborne Carbon Measurement Experiments (ARM-ACME). He is also the Technical Lead for the AmeriFlux Management Project, and the Principal Investigator for the US-ARM AmeriFlux site located in the U.S. Southern Great Plains.

Castanha, Christina - Dr. Castanha is an assistant research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and a senior research associate at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is an ecologist and biogeochemist who studies the effects of climate change and other anthropogenic influences on vegetative land cover and the terrestrial carbon cycle. For the past three years she has been studying conifer seedling demographics in Colorado’s Front Range. And over the past fifteen years she has worked in a variety of locations and on a series of collaborations investigating the controls on carbon cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. Her work uses natural environmental gradients, field experiments, isotope analyses, and laboratory analyses. Cristina holds a B.S. in Fermentation Science from UC Davis (1985), an M.S. in Environmental Systems from Humboldt State University (1992), and a Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley (2004). At UC Berkeley she served as lecturer in Environmental Sciences and as teaching assistant for a variety of classes including Environmental Problems, Development and Classification of Soils, and Renewable Resources for Electrical Generation.

Chambers,Jeffrey - Prof. Chambers is a Faculty Scientist in the Climate Sciences Department at Berkeley Lab, and an Associate Professor in the Geography Department, University of California, Berkeley. His research questions are focused on terrestrial ecosystem ecology, tropical forests and climate change, disturbance and recovery processes, vegetation dynamics, and land-atmosphere interactions.

Collins,William Drew - Dr. William Collins is an internationally recognized expert in climate modeling and climate change science. He serves as the Director for the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division (CESD) in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area (EESA) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, Berkeley Lab). In addition Dr. Collins is a senior scientist at LBNL, a Professor in Residence in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California(UC), Berkeley, and the Director of the Climate Readiness Institute (CRI), a multi-campus initiative to prepare the Bay Area for climate change.

Di Vittorio,Alan V - Dr. Di Vittorio has developed an interdisciplinary research perspective by studying a wide range of interrelated topics and coalescing them to better understand the complexity of the whole earth system. Growing up in rural, forested California influenced his decision to apply my B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science to regional environmental monitoring. This led to an M.S. degree in Aerospace Engineering and Sciences, with emphases in remote sensing and atmospheric and oceanic physics, for which he developed and evaluated an automated method for identifying clouds in satellite imagery.

Feldman,Daniel R - Dr. Feldman’s research focuses on the nexus of climate modeling and remote sensing. He developed algorithms that allow for the direct comparison of climate models with satellite instrument observations of shortwave and longwave spectra and uses this information to ask questions such as how long of an observational record is needed to detect changes in the climate system and whether or not that record can be used to differentiate between the results of climate models with varying forcing and feedback strengths. He is also interested in analyzing existing decadal-length, high-quality satellite observations and observations from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility (ACRF) to understand low-cloud and carbon-climate feedbacks, and to provide radiative closure in order to reduce uncertainty in climate projections.

Jardine, Kolby - Dr. Jardine works at the interface of biochemistry, ecology, and atmospheric sciences (Biochemical Ecology) and is a research scientist with the Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments–Tropics (NGEE-Tropics) project in the Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He worked in the Brazilian Amazon where he installed an isotope trace gas laboratory and an analytical biochemistry and atmospheric chemistry laboratory at the National Institute for Amazon Research in Manaus, Brazil.

Jones,Andrew D - Dr. Jones is Deputy Director of the Climate Readiness Institute and a research scientist in the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he leads the Earth Systems and Society Program Domain. He is the Hydroclimate theme lead for LBL’s Water-Energy Resilience Initiative and the Resilient Systems Grand Challenge lead for the Earth and Environmental Sciences Strategic Vision.

Keenan,Trevor F. - Dr. Keenan is a Scientist in the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley. Prof. Keenan’s interests are centered on understanding the impacts of climate variability and long-term change on terrestrial ecosystem function and land surface dynamics, as well as related feedbacks to the atmosphere through ecosystem carbon cycling and water use. His work combines large ecological data sets (e.g., eddy-covariance, remote sensing), models of ecosystem state and function, and data assimilation/mining tools, with results from in-situ field studies and experiments, to gain a mechanistic understanding of key physical and biological processes.

Koven,Charles Dunbar - Dr. Koven is an Earth System Scientist, working in the Climate Sciences Department. He investigates feedbacks between climate and the carbon cycle. He develops and uses numerical models of soil, vegetation, and atmospheric processes to understand how terrestrial ecosystems respond to climate change, and how these responses shift their balance of greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane. Dr. Koven’s primary research focus is on high-latitude feedbacks to climate change, and in particular the role of soil carbon in permafrost soils, and its response to changing climate.

Kueppers, Lara - Dr. Lara Kueppers is an Faculty Scientist in the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Divisionat Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Assistant Professor in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley. Dr. Kueppers uses field observations and experiments, as well as climate and biosphere models, to investigate climate-ecosystem feedbacks, vegetation dynamics, and the effects of agriculture on the atmosphere. She is the Deputy Director of DOE’s Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments – Tropics (NGEE-Tropics) project. She also directs the Alpine Treeline Warming Experiment through her appointment as Assistant Research Scientist at University of California, Merced.

Moyes, Andrew - Dr. Moyes currently oversees greenhouse gas observations for the Carbon Project of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. He is broadly interested in the interactions between plants, soils and their environment, and between the biosphere and the atmosphere.

Powell, Thomas - Dr. Powell is a forest ecologist that uses empirical and theoretical approaches to understand how terrestrial ecosystems respond to and recover from anthropogenic and natural disturbances. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow working on the NGEE-Tropics project at LBNL. He is using process-based models to understand how climate change will alter demographic rates, community composition and ecosystem function of tropical forests. Prior to joining the lab, Tom received a PhD from Harvard University. His thesis was about the effects of severe drought on the Amazon rainforest. He received a MS in forestry from the University of Florida and a BS in natural resources from the University of the South. Tom also worked as a research scientist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center investigating the effects of elevated CO2 and fire on Florida scrub-oak ecosystems. He started his career working as a forester in Nepal securing non-timber forest products and water resources for Himalayan village communities.

Riley,William J. - Dr. Riley focuses on modeling terrestrial ecosystems and their interactions with climate and climate change. He has a varied educational background, including degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering, physics, and civil and environmental engineering. His published work includes development, testing, and application of numerical models that represent soil microbial dynamics, effects of abiotic processes such as mineral surface interactions, nutrient competition between microbes and plants, watershed-scale hydrological and biogeochemical processes, and climate-scale carbon and nutrient cycle processes.

Romps,David - David Romps’ work on atmospheric dynamics includes research on cloud dynamics, microphysics, and the interaction of clouds with Earth’s climate. David was trained in physics and mathematics at Yale and Harvard

Torn,Margaret S - Dr. Torn is Senior Advisor in the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division (CESD) and lead of the Biosphere-Atmosphere Interactions Program Domain, which includes the Atmospheric Systems Research and Terrestrial Ecosystems Science programs. She is lead PI for three large DOE-supported projects: AmeriFlux Management Project, Belowground Carbon Cycling Scientific Focus Area, and Land-Atmosphere Interactions, and is co-PI for the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment in the Arctic. At U.C. Berkeley, Margaret is an Adjunct Professor in the Energy and Resources Group, where she has taught classes on climate change impacts and adaptation, and a seminar on food systems. In 2003 she received the Presidential Early Career Award as one of the country’s top young scientists and was recently awarded an honorary doctorate by the faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Zurich.

Uhlemann,Sebastian - Dr. Uhlemann is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar whose expertise lies within the geophysical imaging and monitoring of slope hydrological characteristics and processes. His research focuses on the development and application of geophysical techniques (geoelectrical and seismic) to understand hydrological processes that impact upon groundwater dynamics, slope instabilities, and interactions with plants and the atmosphere at a range of scales. This includes optimization of survey designs, integrated analysis of geophysical and environmental/hydrological data, and development of novel geophysical monitoring approaches.

Vahmani, Pouya - Dr. Pouya Vahmani is an expert in urban climate modeling and climate change impacts in urban areas. His research uses a range of numerical models including regional climate models, land surface models, urban canopy models, and hydrological models informed by rich remotely sensed and ground-based observations to further the scientific understanding of the critical elements in achieving sustainable development including urban micro-climate and hydrology, regional to local scale climate processes, extreme weather, and climate adaptation and mitigation.

Yang,Da - Dr. Yang is a faculty scientist in the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab.

Zhu, Qing - Dr. Zhu is a Research Scientist working on global carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) cycles. He has been participating DOE-ACME, Climate-Biogeochemistry feedback SFA, NGEE-Arctic, and NGEE-Tropics projects, being responsible for developing and evaluating new global C-N-P elemental cycles and interaction modules. He also works on benchmark metrics to better inform the model development.