UntamedSkies.com
"An insurmountable object, emotion, or thought
is nothing more than our reluctance to take up
the challenge of trying to understand it."
Menu:
Research
Ongoing Research
Tropical cyclones (TCs) are some of the most extreme severe weather systems on earth that affect many nations in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. The numerous hazards associated with TCs include but are not limited to strong winds, storm surge, heavy rainfall, inland flooding, and tornadoes. The successful mitigation of socioeconomic impacts imparted by these hazards depends upon accurate and timely track and intensity forecasts of TCs. While track forecast errors have steadily decreased over the last several decades, intensity forecasts have not improved significantly. In the Western North Pacific (WNP), the most active TC basin in the world, many major population centers lie along vulnerable coastal zones that depend upon accurate TC intensity forecasts.
I am currently working with Professor Bin Wang at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa to investigate the environmental and structural changes in TCs that lead to rapid intensification (RI). With respect to the WNP, are there any important environmental and TC-scale precursors that are evident prior to the onset of an RI phase? How early can we predict RI? Is it possible to forecast RI when a TC is a weak tropical storm, since intensity change of stronger TCs such as typhoons are known to be governed more by internal dynamics? These and other questions are the focus of this study.
This research involves the collaboration between scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado as well as civilian and military forecasters and researchers at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Pearl Harbor, Hawai'i. It is our hope that by improving our understanding behind the science of TC intensity change, forecasters can be provided with more useful tools at their disposal when issuing important warnings and forecasts for operations.
Past Research
- In the summer of 2010, I served as a research assistant at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, CO. As part of the Forecast Applications Branch of the Global Systems Division, I wrote and organized GrADS scripts for use with Diapost (software from the Hurricane Research Division in Miami, FL) to visualize HWRF simulations of Hurricane Ike (2008). This was in support of the Unmanned Aerial Systems - Observing System Simulation Expermiment (UAS-OSSE), a project aimed at improving our observations of hurricanes and the dynamics behind rapid intensification.
- My M.S. in Meteorology (2010) from the University of Oklahoma involved a numerical modeling study of supercell thunderstorms in an idealized high-resolution hurricane simulation. The supercell-like structures in the simulation resembled observed TC supercells, and it was hypothesized that vertical tilting of baroclinically generated horizontal vorticity may be an important factor in the development of TC supercells.
- As part of my senior honors research at Cornell University for my B.S. in Atmospheric Science (2007), Professor Steve Colucci and I investigated the local minimum of tropical cyclogenesis in the eastern Caribbean. We identified low-level divergence due to the acceleration of the Caribbean Low-Level Jet as a possible contributing factor the climatological suppression of convection in that region. The results were published in the Feb. 2010 issue of the Bullentin of the American Meteorological Society, which can be found in Academic Papers.
- In the summer of 2006, I served as a NOAA Hollings Scholar at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, OK. I worked under Dr. Suzanne Van Cooten and assimilated 2003-2006 rain gauge data for use in the lab’s Tar River Basin project of North Carolina (Coastal and Inland and Flood Observation and Warning Project). I evaluated biases in the lab’s Quantitative Precipitation Estimate products through a case study and gave a presentation at the NOAA Hollings Scholars conference in Silver Spring, MD.