Professor Sonia Lasher-Trapp
Purdue University Department of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
Phone: 765-496-2866
E-mail: slasher@purdue.eduI'm a native Hoosier, having grown up in rural Southern Indiana. As a child I enjoyed watching thunderstorms but was also frightened by the prospect of a tornado hitting our house, especially during the night. At my parents' urging (they were tired of being awakened in the middle of the night by my warnings that we should all retreat to the basement), I decided to learn more about these phenomena.
I attended St. Louis University for my undergraduate education in atmospheric science, and afterward attended the University of Oklahoma for my graduate degrees in meteorology. At Oklahoma I satisfied some of my curiosity of thunderstorms and tornadoes, but discovered a new interest as well: cloud physics. I wondered how those storms produce the varied types and amounts of precipitation that they do. Then I discovered that some of the fundamentals of precipitation formation are yet unknown, even in smaller cumulus clouds. This led me to my doctoral research, and has continued to the present day. After receiving my Ph.D. at Oklahoma I acquired a post-doctoral appointment in the Advanced Study Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO, where I worked with some of the top cloud physicists in the field, and I continued these collaborations in residence at NCAR as a research scientist for the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Most of this work was still studying cumulus clouds and precipitations processes, especially the "warm rain process" whereby clouds produce rain in the absence of ice in the cloud.
Hiking in The Roaches, Derbyshire, England
I joined the faculty here in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Purdue University in January 2003, coming nearly "full circle" geographically. Here at Purdue, I've initiated a Cloud Microphysics Group to research clouds and precipitation processes. Our group collects and analyzes field observations, including radar and aircraft data, and employs computer modeling at a variety of scales to test our ideas and interpret the observations. Recent major foci of our work have included rain formation in trade wind cumulus clouds, winter stratiform clouds and the problematic aircraft icing that may result, and the numerical simulation of hailstorms. New endeavors include conducting numerical modeling at different scales to assess the changing precipitation efficiency of thunderstorms in future regional climates, cumulus entrainment, and ice nucleation in maritime and continental cumuli. Ongoing collaborative work with visualization specialists here at Purdue in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department is proving quite fruitful in developing better visualization tools for both numerical modeling results and observational analysis. The group has also expanded into research on improving atmospheric science education, through a new pilot laboratory designed to give undergraduates an authentic research experience as part of their standard curriculum.
I enjoy having a research group to discuss new ideas (and revisit old ones), and take great satisfaction in assisting students to become better scientists. I also have high hopes that we are producing results of great benefit to society, whether it be by leading to better precipitation forecasts, understanding regional and global climate change, or creating a future generation of atmospheric scientists capable of tacking the challenges that lie ahead.
