She works on topics including climate system dynamics, the influence of the oceans on global scales, data science, and machine learning.
"[2] She is the lead principal investigator of the NSF-NOAA Climate Process Team on Ocean Transport and Eddy Energy,[3] and she is also the lead investigator of an international effort to improve climate models with scientific machine learning called M2LInES.
[15] By using an ocean transport model, Zanna demonstrated that temperature could be treated as a passive variable that did not impact circulation.
[15][16][17] Specifically, the models developed by Zanna and her group showed that the deep oceans have absorbed 436 zettajoules of energy in the past 150 years.
[21][22] In 2022, Zanna was principal lecturer at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Program at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where the topic was "Data-Driven GFD".