Jake Carstens and Shannon Shields officially graduated from FSU last Friday (May 3, 2019), each with a M.S. in Meteorology. Prof. Wing was excited to attend the graduation ceremony as the EOAS department faculty representative and watch Jake and Shannon graduate!
Congratulations to Jake Carstens and Shannon Shields! They are the first two students from the Wing group to defend their M.S. theses. Jake defended his thesis on April 1, 2019, titled "Tropical cyclogenesis from self-aggregated convection in numerical simulations of rotating radiative-convective equilibrium". Shannon defend her thesis the next day, on April 2, 2019, titled "Internauual variability of tropical cyclone potential intensity and lifetime maximum intensity: An analysis of influential factors". They will both graduate with their M.S. degrees this Friday (May 3, 2019). Jake will be staying at FSU to work towards completing his Ph.D. Shannon will continue working with Prof. Wing as a researcher this summer before moving into the workforce. Congratuations and best of luck to both Jake and Shannon!
We welcomed a new graduate student to the group this semester! Evan Jones, a M.S. student at FSU, joined the group and will be investigating precipitation associated with tropical cyclones. Evan received his Bachelors degree from University of Texas - Austin. Evan is co-advised by Prof. Rhys Parfitt. Welcome, Evan! Learn more about our group here.
Prof. Wing published a new paper today in Current Climate Change Reports on the Self-aggregation of Deep Convection and Its Implications for Climate. This invited review article is part of the topical collection on Convection and Climate. It reviews the self-aggregation of deep convection, its impact on the large-scale environment, its dependence on surface temperature, and its implications for climate.
Self-aggregation generates significant humidity variability, dries the mean state, reduces high cloud cover, and increases the ability of the atmosphere to cool to space. Some studies find that convection is more self-aggregated at warmer temperatures but other studies, or other ways of measuring the degree of self-aggregation, disagree (see figure above). There is not a simple, monotonic relationship between self-aggregation and surface temperature.
Self-aggregation, through its effect on the humidity distribution and radiative budget, can affect climate. However, there is uncertainty over how strong the modulation of climate by self-aggregation is, in part because of the ambiguity over its temperature dependence. There are some indications that self-aggregation may modestly reduce climate sensitivity even without a dramatic temperature dependence, but more research is needed to understand this behavior. We hope that RCEMIP will help us answer some of these outstanding questions.
Several group members will be making presentations at upcoming conferences over the next month. Next week, Dr. Wing will be attending the American Geophysical Fall Meeting in Washington, DC, where she is convening and chairing a session on "Insights on Clouds, Convection, and Climate Sensitivity from Idealized Modeling Studies". The oral presentations for this session, which is support of RCEMIP, will be held from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM on Wednesday, December 12. The poster session will be Tuesday from 1:40 PM to 6:00 PM, where Dr. Wing will be presenting a poster (with contributions from graduate student Catherine Stauffer) on RCEMIP (Poster A23K-3027). Dr. Wing will also speak in the Town Hall on Process Understanding and Climate Extremes Analysis for CMIP6. Dr. Wing is also co-author on a poster presentation by Dr. Yumin Moon on "Satellite- and reanalysis-based process-oriented diagnostics of tropical cyclones and its applications to high-resolution GCM simulations" and an oral presentation by Dr. Suzana Camargo on "How strong is the relationship between the large-scale environment and tropical cyclone climatology in climate models?".
Two graduate students will be attending the 99th American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting in early January. Jake Carstens will be presenting his research on "Tropical cyclogenesis from self-aggregated convection in idealized numerical simulations: Sensitivity to planetary vorticity" as poster number 299 in the Seventh Symposium on the Madden-Julian Oscillation and Sub-Seasonal Monsoon Variability. His poster presentation will be on Monday January 7 from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM. Shannon Shields will be presenting results from her internship at NCEP this past summer, on "A subjective evaluation of the winter storm severity index", as poster number 666 in the Ninth Conference on Transition of Research to Operations, on Tuesday January 8 from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM.
Prof. Wing's research on tropical cyclones in climate models, including a recently awarded NOAA grant, has received media attention over the last week. Several news articles and blog posts have discussed the project, and Prof. Wing was interviewed by WCTV Meteorologist Charles Roop. The WCTV interview aired on Sunday September 16, and also features a web extra about tropical cyclones and climate change.
- WCTV
- FSU researcher seeks errors to improve hurricane predictions in climate models.
- State of the Planet
- Rooting out the erros in climate models to better predict hurricanes.
- LDEO News
- Rooting out the errors in climate models to better predict hurricanes.
- FSU News
- FSU researcher rooting out the errors in storm simulation models.
Prof. Wing has been awarded a grant from NOAA's Modeling, Analysis, Predictions and Projections (MAPP) Program, "NA18OAR4310270 Process-oriented diagnosis of tropical cyclone genesis and intensification in high-resolution global models". This is a collaborative project led by Prof. Daehyun Kim at the University of Washington, and also includes Dr. Suzana Camargo at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Dr. Ming Zhao at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. In the project, we will develop and implement diagnostics of the representation of tropical cyclone formation and intensification in climate models. The diagnostics focus on errors resulting from how the models simulate convection, moisture, clouds, and related processes. We initially developed these diagnostics under a previous project funded by NOAA, and now will extend their development and implementation by creating a reference version of the diagnostics from observations, against which a large group of climate models can be validated. This step is crucial to model improvement. For more information, take a look at this FSU news article about the new award.
Read moreWe are now a group of four! Shannon Shields, a second year M.S. student at FSU, joins the group to study tropical cyclone intensity and potential intensity variability. Shannon received her B.S. in Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma. Catherine Stauffer joins the group as a M.S. student. Catherine received her B.S. in Meteorology from Florida State University and will be studying convective aggregation and climate. Welcome, Shannon and Catherine! Learn more about our group here.