Physicist / Climate Scientist
She wanted to be a scientist but not the kind that remains quietly behind a microscope. After studying theories of energy and force, she wanted to apply that information to improve the lives of everyday citizens, such as farmers.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
LG’s father worked for a state government. Her mother was a teacher.
EDUCATION
When LG graduated from a university with a degree in physics, she was not certain about a specific career path.
Editor’s note re ‘Physics’ (per Wikipedia) – Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines, with its main goal being to understand how the universe behaves. A scientist who specializes in the field of physics is called a physicist.
Other natural sciences include astronomy, chemistry, biology, and certain branches of mathematics.
Physics intersects with many interdisciplinary areas of research, such as biophysics and quantum chemistry; the boundaries of physics are not rigidly defined. New ideas in physics often explain the fundamental mechanisms studied by other sciences and suggest new avenues of research in these and other academic disciplines such as mathematics and philosophy.
Advances in physics often enable advances in new technologies. For example, advances in the understanding of electromagnetism, solid-state physics, and nuclear physics led directly to the development of new products that have dramatically transformed modern-day society, such as television, computers, domestic appliances, and nuclear weapons; advances in thermodynamics led to the development of industrialization; and advances in mechanics inspired the development of calculus.
When LG graduated with her Bachelor’s in Science degree, much of the effort in weather forecasting had been directed to predicting climate change over the next 100 years. At this time, ‘climate science’ was in its infancy, but public awareness of things like ozone depletion was growing and she saw an opportunity to put her scientific training to practical use. So, she applied to (was accepted and completed) a doctorate program in atmospheric and oceanic sciences, where she studied the effects of El Nino (an irregularly occurring and complex series of climatic changes affecting the Pacific region and beyond, every few years, characterized by the appearance of unusually warm, nutrient poor water off northern Peru and Ecuador, typically in late December ) and La Nina (a cooling of the water in the Pacific, which occurs at irregular intervals and is associated with widespread changes in weather patterns complementary to those of El Nino, but less extensive and damaging in their effects).
LG was a pioneer in devoting more attention to shorter range weather predictions, honing predictive climate models for what scientists call ‘subseasonal-to-seasonal forecasting’ – the temporal space between everyday weather and long-term climate. To most people, LG believed, such shorter-term climate predictions were more important and useful than the kind of far-off climate predictions that often make news headlines.
Using existing information about each of those irregular climate events, LG developed computer models that could predict how those alternating climatic events (El Nino and La Nina) in the Pacific Ocean affected temperatures and rainfall in distant parts of the world. “The types of hazards we worry most about with respect to climate change projections – such as droughts, heat waves, inundation events – are happening right now, and we can predict them with weeks to months of lead time, rather than merely projecting how their statistics may change in 50 to 100 years,” said LG.
Such an approach represented an abrupt shift from the way climate-prediction models were being used in the early 2000s, said a fellow climate scientist. “LG was a very loud and authoritative voice saying ‘Look, people aren’t making decisions now for things that will be relevant at the end of the century.”
CHALLENGE – BEING A RARE FEMALE WITHIN A MALE DOMINATED CAREER
LG noted: “There was an advantage to being a rare female: I found that if I asserted myself, and reached out to my professors and other scientists, I was more memorable than my average male colleagues because I was different. So, I really embraced that difference.”
CAREER SATISFACTION – APPLYING SCIENCE TO IMPROVE DAILY LIFE
A specific example of the usefulness of LG’s team’s climate research was their creation of a drought-prediction tool for Jamaica that allows farmers and water providers to plan for looming shortages.
But making sure that people could use those tools was harder than it might seem. In many countries, weather and climate are handled by separate agencies, which often did not communicate with one another. And so, in addition to providing data, LG established a series of training programs to show governments how to use that data effectively.
During LG’s years of productive, team led climate research, she was the Director of a university’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, which provided a salary and paid all the expenses of her travel related to climate studies and negotiating with governments to educate their various agencies on how to best implement her scientific research.
So successful was LG’s work that when her university created a project of interdisciplinary campaigns to bring the university’s research to bear on global problems, the university president chose LG’s team to (hopefully) demonstrate its real-world usefulness. The resulting program – ‘Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow’ (known by the loose acronym ‘ACToday’) – works with six countries in the developing world to prepare their food sectors for the impact of climate change. “This was a really classic example of how to take science and actually think about how it will have practical implications,” said the director of a university’s Earth Institute, which oversees the university’s International Research Institute.
