Research
We are broadly interested in scale interactions in the atmosphere and how best to represent these in weather and climate models in order to build resilience in water-susceptible regions. At the moment, we are focused on mesoscale convective systems as a specific instance of this atmospheric scale problem. Mesoscale convective systems are aggregations of thunderstorms that extend over hundreds of kilometers and bring the majority of extreme rainfall throughout the tropics. Their intermediate size in the spectrum of atmospheric phenomena means that they are influenced by both the smallest scales (like ice crystal or droplet formation, called cloud microphysics) and the largest scales (via circulation patterns like the Hadley cell). We are working to understand the smallest scales through benchtop experimentation and idealized parcel modeling and the largest scales through high-resolution storm-resolving simulations.
Clouds and their Climatic Impacts
Sylvia led the editing of a new volume available since December 2023 through AGU Geophysical Monographs on Clouds and their Climatic Impacts with Corinna Hoose at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). It is available through Wiley, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. A short piece was published on it here by Editors’ Vox blog at AGU, as well as an editorial from KIT here.
Latest News
| 19 March 2024 | Thabo won Best Poster Presentation at the Hydrology & Atmospheric Science Department’s El Día del Agua y la Atmósfera. |
|---|---|
| 29 January 2024 | Sylvia is in Baltimore to present at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society. |
| 13 December 2023 | Edgardo and Thabo are presenting at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco! |
| 6 December 2023 | Sylvia is visiting Lund University for a seminar and thesis defense. |
| 3 October 2023 | We were featured in the UofA’s Information Technology news. |
| 1 October 2023 | We have been awarded funding from the NCAR Collaborative Opportunity for Research Engagement (overviews here and here). |
| 1 August 2023 | Welcome to Juliana Mejía, our newest member! |
| 6 July 2023 | Edgardo is visiting our collaborators in Karlsruhe and will travel to the IUGG conference in Berlin next week. |
| 31 May 2023 | Our newest member, Juliana Mejía, was awarded the George and Dixie Shirley Graduate Fellowship for environmental engineers. |
| 15 May 2023 | We are welcoming Tanmay Agrawal to our group to work on visualization of atmospheric model output. |
| 14 May 2023 | Sylvia’s article on cloud-radiative heating over the North Atlantic was accepted in Geoscientific Model Developments. |
| 27 April 2023 | Sylvia visited the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton for a seminar on cloud-radiative heating rates. |
| 15 March 2023 | Edgardo and Thabo’s abstracts have been accepted to the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics in Berlin this summer. |
| 10 November 2022 | We received $13K of funding from UA Research, Impact, and Innovation to facilitate collaboration with those at KIT in 2023. |
| 20 October 2022 | Sylvia’s article on trajectory tracking of ice clouds and their radiative heating was accepted in Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems. |
| 15 September 2022 | Linda Engelman is joining the group as our first undergraduate researcher! |
| 30 August 2022 | Congratulations to Edgardo on receiving a Herbold fellowship from the UA College of Engineering. |
| 22 August 2022 | We are welcoming Thabo Makgoale and Edgardo Sepúlveda to Tucson, AZ and to the group! |