PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Nana Liu

Nana Liu is an atmospheric scientist who studies deep convection and storm systems and applies machine learning to weather and climate data. After a PhD at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, where she presented satellite radar findings on convection reaching the tropopause in 2015, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine. In 2021, she was third author of a global database of mesoscale convective systems, and in 2023 she coauthored ClimSim, a dataset for training machine-learning emulators of climate physics that won a NeurIPS 2023 Outstanding Paper award. She is a Research Scientist at the University of Oklahoma's CIWRO, where her work focuses on estimating precipitation from geostationary satellite data with machine learning.

Timeline

  1. 2015

    Deep convection at the tropopause

    At Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, she earns an MS and a PhD in atmospheric science, after a BS at Lanzhou University. In December 2015, she presents a study of deep convection that reaches the tropopause at the AGU Fall Meeting, using one year of GPM Ku-band radar data and finding frequent overshooting over tropical land, especially Argentina, Panama, Central Africa and the Congo basin.

  2. April 2021

    A global storm database at PNNL

    With an affiliation at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Atmospheric Sciences & Global Change Division, she is third author of a Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres paper published in April 2021. The paper builds a global database of mesoscale convective systems for 2000–2019 at about 10-kilometer hourly resolution, tracking storms with geostationary infrared brightness temperature and satellite precipitation features.

  3. 2023

    The ClimSim dataset

    She is one of the authors of ClimSim, published in the NeurIPS 2023 Datasets and Benchmarks Track. The dataset holds 5.7 billion pairs of input and output vectors from multi-scale climate simulations, built so that machine-learning emulators can take over compute-heavy high-resolution physics in hybrid climate models.

  4. 2023

    A NeurIPS Outstanding Paper award

    ClimSim receives an Outstanding Paper award at NeurIPS 2023. Sungduk Yu is first author and Mike Pritchard last author, and she is among the authors in between.

  5. As of October 2026

    Research scientist at CIWRO

    She is a Research Scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations (CIWRO) at the University of Oklahoma, and a member of the NSSL team that builds the MRMS quantitative precipitation estimation products. Her work focuses on estimating precipitation from geostationary satellite data with machine learning, after postdoctoral research at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine.

Career

  1. NowUniversity of OklahomaResearch Scientist
  2. Office of SciencePostdoctoral Researcher
  3. University of California, IrvinePostdoctoral Researcher

Education

  1. Lanzhou UniversityBS
  2. Texas A&M University – Corpus ChristiMS and PhD

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Nana Liu. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes University of Oklahoma. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  3. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes University of California, Irvine. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes University of California, Irvine. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Nana Liu yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Abstract: Global Distribution of Deep Convection Penetrating Tropopause (2015 AGU Fall Meeting) agu.confex.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Nana Liu ou.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. A Global High-Resolution Mesoscale Convective System Database Using Satellite-Derived Cloud Tops, Surface Precipitation, and Tracking | Earth & Environmental Systems Modeling eesm.science.energy.gov. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. ClimSim: A large multi-scale dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation proceedings.neurips.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. NeurIPS 2023 Awards neurips.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. People – MRMS QPE inside.nssl.noaa.gov. Checked 21 October 2026.