Presentations at UW Undergraduate Research Symposium

Yesterday was the University of Washington’s 21st annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, which provides undergraduates the opportunity to present their research to a broader audience. Two undergraduate students in the Atmospheric Sciences department that I have been mentoring over this academic year presented their research related to OLYMPEX and the upcoming RELAMPAGO field campaign:

 

Jamin Rader: “Cloud and Precipitation Structure on the Leeward Side of the Olympic Mountains” (Oral presentation in Session 1L: Sound to Mountains: Water, Life, and Climate in the Salish Sea)

Kyle Anderson: “Thunderstorm Initiation in the Lee of the Andes” (Poster Presentation in Poster Session 3)

Nice work, Jamin and Kyle!

Annual DOE ASR Meeting

This week, I’ll be attending the DOE’s 2018 Joint ARM User Facility and ASR PI meeting in Vienna, Virginia. I’ll be presenting two posters as Co-Investigator for two ASR-funded projects and co-leading a breakout session about GOAmazon updates.  You can view the two posters here:

• Serra, Y. and Rowe, A.: Local and Large-scale Controls of Moisture Variability in the Shallow-to-deep Transition During GOAmazon
• Cheng, W., Kim, D., Rowe, A., Moon, Y., and Park, S.: Objective Quantification of Convective Clustering Using Ground-based Radar Reflectivity During AMIE/DYNAMO

Presenting OLYMPEX and GOAmazon research at AGU’s Fall Meeting

AGU’s Fall Meeting is my favorite conference. While at times overwhelming with 20,000+ attendees and, in the case of New Orleans, a mile-long trek from one end of the conference center to the other, it’s an excellent opportunity to present my research to a wider audience and learn about research in other disciplines. I haven’t been to AGU for years due to being in the field (OLYMPEX 2015-16) and organizing symposia for the AMS annual meeting last year so it felt especially exciting to attend this year. The views flying from SEA to MSY were also spectacular.

 

I gave an oral presentation during Wednesday’s GPM session about my ongoing NSF-funded OLYMPEX research. Titled “Upper-level enhancement of microphysical processes in extratropical cyclones in OLYMPEX”, I presented a detailed analysis using ground-based and airborne radar data with in situ microphysical measurements from the UND Citation. This session kicked off with Prof. Lynn McMurdie describing our collaborative work on looking at orographic enhancement aloft and included many other exciting talks from this unprecedented dataset.

Prof. Lynn McMurdie and I on our way to AGU

Our GPM OLYMPEX session

 

I presented a poster on Friday morning about my DOE-funded work with Dr. Yolande Serra on the shallow-to-deep convective transition using data from GOAmazon. It was my first time presenting on the last day of the conference, and I was pleasantly surprised by the large amount of traffic and nearly constant discussions for the 4.5 hours at my poster. We’ll be writing up these results in the next couple of months after implementing some additional feedback received during this meeting.

 

AGU also offers valuable opportunities to meet up with colleagues and friends. In addition to catching up with friends in the midst of jazz heaven, we were also able to meet in person to discuss research. Here a subset of our RELAMPAGO team discussing radar scanning strategies and mobile deployment plans for our upcoming field campaign in Argentina.

 

To finish off the meeting, I attended a session merging music and science, which was such an interesting series of talks. From turning measurements into music to using music as a tool for teaching science, I left feeling inspired to make more effort to implement the A in STEAM.

ICMCS-XII, NTU, TTFRI: A productive week in Taipei

Nearly 10 years ago, I visited Taiwan for the first time as a participant in the Terrain-influenced Rainfall Experiment (TiMREX). Since then, I’ve continued to build off that project and the associated productive collaborations, which have brought be back to Taiwan on many occasions as an invited participant and presenter at conferences.

Enjoying a view of Taipei 101

During the week of 16 October 2017, I was invited and generously supported by my National Taiwan University (NTU) colleagues to participate in the 12th International Conference on Mesoscale Convective Systems and High-Impact Weather in Asia (ICMCS-XII). I built off my Ph.D. research on analysis of convection in the mountainous regions of northwest Mexico and southwest Taiwan through a radar-based comparison of mesoscale convective systems in these regions with those observed over the tropical Indian Ocean during the Dynamics of the MJO (DYNAMO) experiment. The conference also offered an exciting opportunity to learn more about high-impact weather research in Taiwan, China, Japan, and South Korea.

I was also invited to give a seminar at NTU. I chose to present my recent research from the Olympic Mountains Experiment (OLYMPEX). My presentation generated an interesting discussion on the role mountains play in the distribution and intensity of precipitation in mid-latitude frontal systems compared to what is observed in mountainous subtropical Taiwan. Whenever I present to this audience, I am always reminded to reframe how I talk about “extreme” rainfall, as our annual rainfall in the Olympic Mountains has been measured in only a few days during typhoons impacting Taiwan.

 

 

In addition to the seminar and conference, we had several meetings at the Taiwan Typhoon and Flood Research Institute (TTFRI) who will be important collaborators in our future effort to study extreme rainfall in this region. I appreciated the productive discussions and the opportunity to share our common interests in better understanding high-impact weather both in the ideal mountainous laboratory that is Taiwan and applying that understanding to other regions around the world.

Meeting participants at TTFRI

As always, I appreciate the unmatched hospitality of our Taiwan hosts and the immense work that went into organizing such an interesting, exciting conference. I also greatly appreciated the invitation to visit a radar site near the northern coast, where an operational S-band radar and research C-band radar sits atop a mountain. I learned that the S-band radar has been destroyed TWICE by typhoons and continues to serve as an important tool for forecast operations in Taipei.

 

 

I also enjoyed catching up with old friends and celebrating their successes nearly a decade after we met during TiMREX.

Until next time, Taiwan…