Research

Climate dynamicist launches Climate and Weather Extremes Lab at SFU

January 23, 2025

As atmospheric rivers become a household name throughout the northwest coast of North America, climate dynamicist and data scientist, Mengxin Pan, joins SFU’s Faculty of Environment to advance understandings of the weather phenomenon, and how they will change under a warming climate.

Pan is the director of the new Climate and Weather Extremes Lab and an assistant professor in the Department of Geography. Her research seeks to better understand the physical mechanisms of extreme climate and weather events, like atmospheric rivers, to help detect and predict future occurrences.

Pan notes that atmospheric rivers are not only to blame for high precipitation levels, but they can also impact mountain snowpack and wildfire seasons, however, much is still unknown about these rivers in the sky.

“We need to understand better why some atmospheric rivers die out over the ocean and why some can make landfall; why some land in the north and some land in the south,” she says. “This will help us to better predict atmospheric rivers and precipitation in Vancouver, and along the west-coast.”

Pan has also applied her expertise in climate dynamics to a range of cross-disciplinary projects that help to bridge gaps between the science of climate change and societal impacts.

For example, during her postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University, Pan worked with global health researchers to predict malaria outbreaks in Latin America using sea surface temperature data from the tropical ocean. Pan also worked with civil engineering researchers to assess infrastructure resilience in a warming world.

As a climate dynamicist and data scientist, Pan explains that her work utilizes advanced machine learning algorithms to extract information from large amounts of data. In the case of atmospheric rivers, Pan uses these algorithms to analyze daily observations for thousands of atmospheric rivers, all of which are unique from one another. “We use machine learning for what is called data mining to look at the data and extract a pattern that we may not be able to see just by looking at it,” she says. “From here, climate dynamics are applied to the physical mechanism of the pattern, and climate simulations are used to model what the atmospheric river will look like in the future.”

Pan notes that she is excited by the opportunity to foster new collaborations at SFU, both within her lab and across the university, to bridge the gap between science and society in facing climate change.

Interested in getting involved in the Climate and Weather Extremes Lab? Learn more about opportunities for master's and PhD students here.

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