Rong Zhang

Rong Zhang is a Chinese-American physicist and climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Her research considers the impact of Atlantic meridional overturning circulation on climate phenomena. She was elected Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 2018 and appointed their Bernhard Haurwitz Memorial Lecturer in 2020.

Early life and education Zhang was born in China. She attended Tsinghua University, where she studied electronic engineering. After graduating, she moved to Boston University, where she worked toward a graduate degree in physics. She was a doctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on climate science. She has said that this variability could slow the pace of Arctic summer sea icea loss.

Zhang showed that the sea in the Gulf of Maine has warmed faster than 99% of the global ocean, which results in changes in the distribution and species composition. Her climate models, which use a 10 km ocean grid, have ten times the resolution of those developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Selected publications