Current Work
Updated randomly!
January 28, 2021
My first published article as lead author has been put online in the Springer Journal of Climate Dynamics! You can
read it here! This paper discusses the effects reduced snowcover over the Rocky Mountains has on local orographically forced convection and how it connects to climate warming.
May 29, 2020
Passed my prospectus defense entitled "On Projected Rainfall Under Cliamte Warming for the North American Monsoon"! The work will be split into three parts examining the NAM convective response to climate warming and the sensitivity of this response to surface features. Part 1 will use a series of continental scale convection permitting climate regional climate model output to assess the overall NAM convective response at convection permitting scales. Part 2 will seek to determine how regional moisture sources for the NAM may change. Part 3 will determine the NAM sensitivity to SSTs in the Gulf of California.
July 26, 2018
Presented preliminary results at the AMS Mountain Met 2018 conference in Santa Fe, NM. You can see a
recorded version of the presentation here! The presentation also
won an award!
The current focus now is preparing several more model runs looking at soil moisture impacts on precipitation to be presented in a poster at the upcoming GEWEX Convection Permitting Climate Modeling Workshop in September.
April 14, 2018
Getting to work running multi-year seasonal WRF simulations at 4 km across the intermountain Western US centered on the Colorado Headwaters region! Sets of simulations include a control, pseudo-global warming (PGW), PGW w/ CTRL snow variables, and PGW w/ CTRL snow & soil moisture variables. A LOT (!!!) of time has been spent editing the WRF land surface files for the PGW w/ CTRL snow and PGW w/ CTRL soil and snow runs. I've got a writeup on this coming soon! Essentially it allows the user to override the calculation of certain land surface properties within the land surface scheme and instead use data from another source. In this scenario, variables such as snow cover, snow height, and snow water equivalent are not calculated within the model but are instead set equal to an equal sized array of those variables within another grid. There are a lot of considerations when doing this and it's a good forray into better understanding how WRF works.
August 24, 2017
Running WRF simulations of a case study over the Western US to monitor how modifying the initialized snowcover and soil moisture affects diurnal mountain convection. Check out a
video showing how the change in model resolution can impact how much diurnal precipitation is produced.
