UCI Graduate Student Working with CW3E Wins AGU Award

January 21, 2026

Nazak Rouzegari, a Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing (CHRS) at UC Irvine, who works closely with the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E) machine learning team at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, has received the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Precipitation Technical Committee Student Award for her presentation at the AGU 2025 Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans.

This award recognizes one of the top student presentations in the competition, based on scientific quality, originality, and clarity of presentation. This award was given in recognition of Nazak’s research on regional, kilometer-scale, data-driven precipitation forecasting over the western U.S. using artificial intelligence (AI). The work focuses on AI-driven weather forecasting model with 2-km resolution for medium-range precipitation and atmospheric river forecasting using graph-transformer architecture inspired by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Anemoi framework. The model leverages high-resolution CW3E West-WRF reanalysis data and shows improved skill in capturing extreme precipitation and atmospheric river events.

Nazak is supported and mentored by Drs. Luca Delle Monache, Agniv Sengupta, and Vesta Afzali Gorooh at CW3E, as well as her Ph.D. advisors, Professors Soroosh Sorooshian, Phu Nguyen, and Kuo-Lin Hsu at CHRS.

Nazak Rouzegari presenting her poster at AGU