Climate and Extreme Weather Research
Given the current level of understanding of phenomena like hurricanes, extratropical cyclones, and severe thunderstorms-which result from complex interactions between many scales of motion in the atmosphere-it is difficult to skillfully predict if these weather phenomena will become something extraordinary ; a similar statement may be made for events such as an extended heat wave or seasonal flooding. Adding a sense of urgency to this already complicated problem are projections of more frequent, and perhaps more intense extreme events in future climates. The Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences is responding to this problem through its focus on Climate and Extreme Weather (CLEW), which seeks to: Understand and predict the physical and statistical behavior of extreme weather and climate events.
Droplet trajectories within a 3D numerical simulation of the turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) field within a growing cumulus cloud. Droplets can grow faster by collection of other droplets in regions of high TKE (pink regions of cloud, with present valus given by "hotness" of dot color), but this growth will be most efective in speeding rain formation if they then subsequently enter regions of greater cloud water (denoted by warm colors along trajectory)
Affiliated Faculty & Research Area
| Ernie Agee | Mesoscale convection, thunderstorms and tornadoes, coherent structures and cold air outbreaks |
| Mike Baldwin | Characteristics of weather systems, numberical weather prediction, forecast verification, data assimilation, data mining |
| Alex Gluhovsky | Atmospheric and climate dynamics: low-order models, coherent structures, predictability, time |
| Kevin Gurney | Global carbon cycle, inverse modeling and data assimilation, biogeochemistry, industrial CO2 emissions modeling, cimate-carbon interactions, climate change policy |
| Jennifer Haase | Remote sensing studies of atmospheric properties for improving numberical weather predition of hurricanes and severe storms |
| Matt Huber | Dynamics of past, present and future climates, ocean-atmosphere interactions, tracer transport |
| Sonia Lasher-Trapp | Cloud microphysics, precipitation, giant aerosol, cloud entrainment, numberical modeling and measurements of clouds and precipitation |
| Dev Niyogi | Convection initiation and land surface heterogeneity, severe weather climatology, heavy precipitation processes, satellite data assimilation, landfall hurricanes and tropical systems, Indian monsoon |
| Wen-Yih Sun | Geofluid dynamics, numerical modeling, boundary layer meterology, land-atmosphere and air-sea interactions, surface hydrology, regional climate, and monsoons |
| Jeff Trapp | Dynamics of mesoscale convective systems, severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, mesoscale modeling and predictability, climate change |
| Wen-wen Tung | Dynamical predictability, multiscale, convective systems, tropical dynamics (monsoons, waves, intraseasonal oscillation), multiscale analysis of complex time series |
| Qianlai Zhuang | Interactions of biosphere and atmosphere |