Current Research
I am a Professor in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading.
I study atmospheric convection, tropical weather and tropical
climate. I am particularly interested in the interaction
between convection and larger-scale fields and the organization of
convection, including convective self-aggregation and its role in observed organized convection
as well as interactions involving the vertical structure of temperature and
moisture at various spatial scales.
I'm also involved in efforts
to improve the way current global weather and climate models
represent convection and turbulence, and I am also part of a UK government-funded project
organized by the Met Office that aims to build capability to underpin
services that support weather resilient economic development and
social welfare in Southeast Asia (WCSSP
Southeast Asia). In addition, I am involved in a project
that is one of several that seek to improve
our understanding of cloud feedbacks and their effect on climate
sensitivity.
Previous Work
I was an independent NERC
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in NCAS-Climate
at the University of Reading
Department of Meteorology
from May 2012-April 2015, and a Lecturer in the department from May
2015-July 2018. My fellowship project, titled "The
Organization of Tropical Rainfall," sought to identify the processes
that lead to convective self-aggregation (spontaneous clustering) in
idealized high-resolution model simulations and to explore the
extent to which they are important for convective organization in
the real world. This has implications for phenomena including the
Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) and tropical cyclones, which are
among my broader research interests. My work on convective
aggregation includes analysis of the vertical
structure of clouds in satellite data for different
aggregation states and an investigation of processes important for
aggregation in simulations of realistic
case studies of organized convection.
I was a postdoc at the University
of Reading Department of Meteorology
from July 2008-May 2012, working with Steve Woolnough on the Cascade
project, a part of NCAS-Climate.
Cascade aimed to better understand the organization of tropical
convection at many scales using the UK Met Office Unified Model (UM)
at resolutions as high as 1.5 km and domains spanning several
thousand km across. The main focus of my work has been to study the
differences between explicit and parameterized convection for
simulations of the same case studies.
I did my Ph.D. work with David Neelin at the Department of Atmos. and Oc. Sci. at UCLA. My Ph.D. dissertation sought to
determine how many vertical degrees of freedom are necessary to
characterize temperature and moisture in the tropical atmosphere,
especially on General Circulation Model (GCM) gridbox space and
time scales and larger. Assumptions of simple vertical
structure made by the quasi-equilibrium tropical circulation model
(QTCM) were tested in various observational sources. A
broader motivation was to better understand climate variability
and change, both in observations and in GCM simulations.
My publications can be found at: Publications.
My Ph.D. Dissertation is posted at: Dissertation
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