Defenses for Fall 2019

Fire and Ice: Analyzing Ice Nucleating Particle Emissions from Western U.S. Wildfires

October 01, 2019

Kevin Barry

Wildfires in the western U.S. can have impacts on health and air quality and are forecasted to increase in the future. Some of the particles released from wildfires can affect cloud formation through serving as ice nucleating particles (INPs). INPs are necessary for heterogenous ice formation in mixed-phase clouds at temperatures warmer than about -38 °C and can have climate implications from…

Midlatitude Prediction Skill Following QBO-MJO activity on Subseasonal to Seasonal Timescales

September 30, 2019

Kirsten Mayer

The Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) is known to force extratropical weather days-to-weeks following an MJO event through excitation of Rossby waves, also known as tropical-extratropical teleconnections. Prior research has demonstrated that this tropically forced midlatitude response can lead to increased prediction skill on subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) timescales. Furthermore, the…

Consistency in the AMSR-E Snow Products: Groundwork for a Coupled Snowfall and SWE Algorithm

September 20, 2019

Ryan Gonzalez

Snow is an important wintertime property due to its role in water resource management and land-atmosphere interactions. The variability of snowfall, both interannually and seasonally, poses a challenge for water resource management decisions. Changes in snow-cover significantly alter the land surface albedo and influence local to regional atmospheric processes. Total land covered by snow is…

CHARACTERISTICS OF LINEAR MESOSCALE CONVECTIVE SYSTEMS DURING DYNAMO

August 19, 2019

Joseph Messina

Mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) have long been known to play a large part in the vertical transport of horizontal momentum. They also contribute to the vertical redistribution of heat and radiative forcing. The Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) is a tropical disturbance that propagates across the central Indian Ocean and western Pacific Ocean with an intraseasonal cycle of 30-60 days. Many…