CHRISTOPHER M. CASTELLANO

Hi all.  I am a second-year graduate student in the Department of Atmospheric & Environmental Sciences at the University at Albany, SUNY.  I received my B.S. in Atmospheric Science at Cornell University (2010) and hope to earn my M.S. from SUNY Albany in 2012.  For my Master's thesis, I am working on a CSTAR project under the supervision of Dr. Lance Bosart and Dr. Daniel Keyser.  The CSTAR initiative involves a collaboration of the university's Atmospheric Science program and the National Weather Service, through which graduate students, faculty, and NWS personnel conduct reserach in certain areas of meteorology that are pertinent to operational forecasting.  Specifically, my research will concentrate on ice storms and freezing precipitation in the Eastern United States.  These phenomena create extremely hazardous conditions during winter, and are responsible for economic losses, power outages, transportation headaches, and even fatalities.  We must acquire a better understanding of these events in order to fulfill NOAA's mission to protect life, property, and economic prosperity. Our primary research objectives include: 1) creating a long-term climatology of frozen precipitation for first-order stations in the eastern U.S., 2) determining the synoptic and mesoscale environments favorable for significant icing events in the Northeast, and 3) developing forecast methodologies to improve operational forecasting of major ice storms.  Overall, my interests lie in the fields of synoptic-dynamic and mesoscale meteorology, with a particular emphasis on extratropical cylcones and winter weather phenomenoa.  In addition, I have academic and careers interests in the fields of physical geography, hydrology, and geographic information science. I currently hold a Graduate Teaching Assistantship and serve as a head TA for undergraduate courses in the department.

Number of ice storms impacting each county during the 1993-2010 period.