|
Warren Washington named to engineering academy |
|
|
|
|
|
| Warren Washington. (Photo by Carlye Calvin.) | |
The National Academy of Engineering has elected Warren Washington of CGD to its membership in honor of his internationally recognized modeling work. Announcing the decision on 15 February, NAE president William Wulf praised the senior scientist for “pioneering the development of coupled climate models, their use on parallel supercomputing architectures, and their interpretation.”
Academy membership honors those who have made important contributions to engineering theory and practice and those who have demonstrated unusual accomplishments in the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology.
“All of us at NCAR are honored by the NAE’s election of Warren Washington to its membership,” says NCAR director Tim Killeen. “Warren’s groundbreaking work in the area of global climate modeling helped pave the way toward our current understanding of the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on the Earth’s climate.”
For over 20 years Warren’s group at CGD has used coupled climate models to estimate the effects of increasing greenhouse gases.
“At the beginning of this effort, the components of the models were fairly simple, compared to today’s state-of-the-art climate models,” says Warren. To keep up with the models’ increasing complexity and growing need for computing speed, he has led an effort to apply parallel supercomputing architectures, in which multiple processors perform many calculations simultaneously to climate change projections.
In addition to developing the models, Warren has participated in major international efforts to assess the role of greenhouse gases in climate change. He is serving a second term on the National Science Board, and he was a scientific advisor to the administrations of former presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.
Former NCAR director Robert Serafin was elected to NAE membership in 1994, and senior scientist Margaret LeMone was elected in 1997
•Bob Henson
|
Edited by David Hosansky,
hosansky@ucar.edu
Prepared for the Web by Carlye Calvin
Last revised: Wed Mar 13 17:08:40 MST 2001