Cheng Da Author

Eugenia Kalnay completed her Ph.D. at MIT under Jule Charney and became the first woman in the faculty in the Department of Meteorology. She moved in 1979 to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where she developed the 4th order global numerical model and led experiments in the new science called 'data assimilation'. In 1984 she became Head of NASA's Global Modeling and Simulation Branch. In 1987 she became Director of NOAA's Environmental Modeling Center where many improvements of models and data assimilation were developed for the National Weather Service forecasts. Her paper: The NCEP/NCAR 40-year Reanalysis Project (Kalnay et al., 1996) is the most cited paper in all Geosciences. In 1997, Kalnay became Lowry Chair at University of Oklahoma, and in 1999 became Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences Department Chair and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, where she was later elected a Distinguished University Professor. Safa Mote is an Assistant Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Portland State University and an Earth Systems Scientist who has worked on a wide range of challenging interdisciplinary problems. He has two Ph.D. degrees in Physics as well as Applied Mathematics and Statistics, and Scientific Computing from the University of Maryland. He designs mathematical models to propose and assess holistic policies that lead to sustainability in interconnected environmental, economic, climate, and health systems. He develops computational methods based on Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, and Data Assimilation to forecast extreme weather and climate events and create projections for the coupled Energy–Water–Food Nexus. Cheng Da works on Coupled Data Assimilation as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Maryland and the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Supported by the NASA NESSF fellowship, he earned his Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Professor Kalnay at the University of Maryland, focusing on the assimilation of precipitation and nonlocal observations in the ensemble data assimilation system and coupled data assimilation. Before this, he earned his bachelor's and Master's degrees in Meteorology at Florida State University, working on radiance assimilation from spaceborne sensors.