Nora Loose

Timeline

1. August 2019

   A Bergen doctorate

   She defends her PhD at the University of Bergen in August 2019, as one of the ice2ice project's PhD students, with a thesis on adjoint modeling and observing system design in the subpolar North Atlantic. Her adjoint-derived sensitivities in the ECCO state estimate identify drivers and locations, including remote wind forcing, that affect ocean heat transport in the seas around Greenland, Iceland and Norway.

2. By 2021

   Postdoc at CU Boulder

   By 2021, she is a postdoctoral researcher with Ian Grooms at the University of Colorado Boulder, working with the Ocean Transport and Eddy Energy Climate Process Team. In May 2021, she and Patrick Heimbach of the University of Texas at Austin take Hessian uncertainty quantification within the ECCO framework to a joint ECMWF/OceanPredict workshop on ocean data assimilation. Their paper on designing ocean climate observing systems appears in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems in 2021.

3. February 2022

   The GCM-Filters package

   In February 2022, the Journal of Open Source Software publishes GCM-Filters, a Python package for diffusion-based spatial filtering of gridded data, with Loose as first of 13 authors. The package works with gridded data from general circulation models of ocean, weather and climate, and she leads its development.

4. 2022

   Papers on mesoscale eddies

   In 2022, she publishes two first-author papers on mesoscale eddies in an isopycnal ocean model: one in the Journal of Physical Oceanography on scale-dependent energy cycles, and one in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems comparing two parameterizations for the restratification effect of eddies. She also compares the Gent & Williams (1990) and Greatbatch & Lamb (1990) parameterizations from theoretical and numerical perspectives.

5. 2023

   ClimSim at NeurIPS

   She is one of the authors of ClimSim, a multi-scale dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation built by a consortium of climate scientists and ML researchers, which receives an Outstanding Datasets and Benchmarks Paper award in the dataset category at NeurIPS 2023. In the M2LInES project, she applies machine learning to develop hybrid climate models, integrating machine-learned eddy parameterizations with traditional ocean model dynamical cores.

6. August 2026

   ROMS-Tools and [C]Worthy

   In August 2026, the Journal of Open Source Software publishes ROMS-Tools, a Python package for creating the input files needed to run a ROMS regional ocean simulation, with Loose as first of 15 authors. Before joining the Nansen Center, she is a Staff Scientist at [C]Worthy, a non-profit research organization that quantifies the efficiency of ocean-based carbon dioxide removal, where she develops methods for accelerating ocean biogeochemical simulations.

7. As of October 2026

   Researcher at the Nansen Center

   She is a researcher at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Bergen, where she works with the physical ocean component of the TOPAZ forecasting system to improve the representation of ocean physics in the Arctic and North Atlantic. She is also a PI in the DJ4Earth project, which is making Julia-based Earth system models, including Oceananigans, differentiable.