Haiyan Teng

Haiyan Teng is a climate scientist specializing in climate variability, predictability, and change. Her research spans the atmosphere, ocean, land, and sea ice, utilizing observational data and climate models such as the Community Earth System Model (CESM).

She earned her Ph.D. in Climate Dynamics from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a B.S. in Dynamic Meteorology from Peking University. Before joining NCICS as Associate Director in 2024, she spent 16 years at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), where she contributed to major climate modeling efforts, including the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP3–CMIP6). As a contributing author to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), she was part of the team recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize.

In addition to her work on large-scale community projects, Haiyan has pursued curiosity-driven research on extreme events associated with high-amplitude Rossby waves and decadal predictability. Her research on heatwave predictability was featured as a cover story in Nature online in 2013. She co-developed a framework to quantify decadal predictability, which influenced the experimental design of the Decadal Climate Prediction Project from CMIP5 to CMIP6.

Dr. Teng has held leadership roles in national and international climate research panels, including US CLIVAR and the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Explaining and Predicting Earth System Change (EPESC) Lighthouse Activity. She has also served as Task Lead for the DOE-UCAR Cooperative Agreement (2019-2020), Co-Lead of the NCAR Climate & Global Dynamics (CGD) Earth System Prediction Project (2019-2020), Team Lead at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (2021-2022), and Climate & Atmosphere Process Domain Lead at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2022-2024)—advancing large-scale community projects, scientific collaboration, and institutional strategy.