CCR People

Susan Bates, Project Scientist

Research

Dr. Bates is a Project Scientist in the Climate Change Research Section of the Climate and Global Dynamics Division at NCAR. Her career in oceanography and climate dynamics has included: teaching, research and community service. Susan is one of the CESM Climate Change and Variability Working Group (CVCWG) co-chairs and the Project Manager for the Climate Change Prediction (CCP) Group. In these roles, she manages the CCP group’s computing allocations at NSF and DOE supercomputing centers, coordinates collaborative research resulting from these simulations, and coordinates and supervises the running of simulations and post-processing and publishing of the resulting data. Susan is a member of the advisory committee for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and attends the annual user symposium where she presents her group’s research. She has been a member of the organizing committee for the CESM tutorial every year since its inception in 2010 (except for 2015) and led the tutorial in 2013. Susan has also taught the ocean portion of the tutorial and volunteers to help during the lab sessions every year.

Susan's research interests lie in the area of large-scale air-sea interaction, the role of the ocean in climate, and the impacts of a warming climate on high impact events. Her recent research topics include tropical and mid-latitude storms in high-resolution versions of the CESM including how they may change with future climate changes and how underlying sea surface temperature may affect their number and intensity, sea level variability, and resolution studies of high impact events. Along with two of her group members, Susan collaborated with NCAR’s visualization lab to produce animations of output from high-resolution simulations to illustrate the exciting capabilities of the model.

Climate Change: Comparison Between Present and Future Precipitable Water

Surface Wind Speed from a High Resolution Simulation of Present Day Earth Using the Community earth System Model

Climate Change: Using a High Resolution Atmospheric Model (25km)

• Member of the American Geophysical Union

• Member of the American Meteorological Society

• Member of the Earth Science Women's Network

Recent Publications

Hu, A. and S.C. Bates, Influence of internal climate variability on mitigating the projected future regional sea level rise, Nature Communications (in review).

Bacmeister, J. T., K. A. Reed, C. Hannay, P. Lawrence, S. Bates, J. Truesdale, N. Rosenbloom, and M. Levy, 2016: Projected changes in tropical cyclone activity under future warming scenarios using a high-resolution climate model, Climatic Change, doi: 10.1007/s10584-016-1750-x.

Zarzycki, C. M., Reed, K. A., Bacmeister, J., Craig, A. P., Bates, S. C., and Rosenbloom, N. A., 2016: Impact of ocean coupling strategy on extremes in high-resolution atmospheric simulations, Geosciences Model Development, 9, 779-788, doi:10.5194/gmd-9-779-2016.

Reed, K.A., J.T. Bacmeister, N.A. Rosenbloom, M.F. Wehner, S.C. Bates, P.H. Lauritzen, J.E. Truesdale, and C. Hannay, 2015: Impact of the dynamical core on the direct simulation of tropical cyclones in a high-resolution global model, Geophysical Research Letters, 42, 3603–3608, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2015GL063974.