Lixin Lu

Lixin Lu received her Ph.D. in atmospheric science at Colorado State University in May 1999. Her dissertation entitled "The Implementation of a Two-way Interactive Atmospheric and Ecological Model and its Application to the Central United States" won the American Geophysical Union outstanding student paper award fall 1998.

As part of her research, Lixin developed a coupled RAMS/CENTURY modeling system to study regional-scale two-way interactions between the atmosphere and biosphere. Lixin found that seasonal and inter-annual vegetation phenology strongly influences regional climate patterns through its control over land-surface water and energy exchange. She also concluded that a regional climate model is highly constrained by its prescribed lateral boundary conditions. To make a regional model two-way interactive with a general circulation model might be solve this problem.

Lixin received her B.E. in environmental engineering from Tsinghua University in 1990, and an M.Sc. in atmospheric physics from Peking University in 1993.

Lixin’s research interests include interactive atmosphere and vegetation modeling, land-atmosphere interactions, mesoscale modeling, numerical weather forecast, ecosystem dynamics and modeling, global and regional climate change, seasonal and interannual climate predictions, and air pollution meteorology.

During her post-doc with the Network Office, Lixin will implement her coupled model on the system at SDSC. With the enhanced computational capability, Lixin will be able to investigate atmosphere and vegetation feedback for longer time scales through multi-year simulation and resolve meso-scale circulation by running her model at higher resolutions.