I’m currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University.
My work explores where and when anthropogenic changes are most important for clouds. Human activities are perturbing the atmosphere in many different ways. We alter the aerosol environment by changing emission sources (think: factories, shipping lanes). At the same time, we drive changes in the land surface (think: deforestation, urbanization) that impact how the land exchanges energy and moisture with the atmosphere above it. On top of all of that, anthropogenic CO2 emissions drive changes to the background environment (think: climate change) that storms develop in!
I examine how those combined perturbations to the earth system drive changes in cloud and precipitation properties. My goal is to untangle the complicated interplay of microphysics, dynamics, and radiation processes (many of which are not represented explicitly in our global or regional models) that control convective initiation and development. Every cloud is different, and the balance of processes can be varied even within a single cloud field! Understanding this variability and its ultimate effects is important for water availability, extreme weather, and the climate system, and is essential to understanding how we are changing the weather and climate on the planet we live on.
I use a combination of satellite data, field observations, and cloud-resolving models in my research. With advances in computational power and new observation platforms, we have orders of magnitude more data than ever before. I’m really interested in how we can use new techniques like object-based analysis to get from data to a better process-level understanding of cloud physics.
I’m very passionate about science communication and justice in STEM, especially relating to the Global South. Outside of work, you can usually find me at the pottery studio, testing out a new recipe, or riding my bike somewhere pretty!
research areas
news
- Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper visited the CSU Department of Atmospheric Science today. I led a team that demonstrated our work with radiosondes and drones.
- I'm in Jeju, South Korea this week to attend the International Conference on Clouds and Precipitation. I'll be presenting some new work using object-tracking to characterize convective mass flux in the INCUS large eddy simulation dataset.
- This summer, I'm helping lead a series of radiosonde launches as part of the TIME-SLICE campaign in preparation for the INCUS mission. Check out the rest of our team's instrumentation at our supersite in Northern Colorado here! We've also been hosting a lot of K-12 outreach events associated with these launches.
- The first paper from my FINESST grant is now out in GRL! We use two decades of satellite data to show that deforestation in Southeast Asia has driven a robust increase in shallow clouds on annual timescales. We also show, for the first time, that some regions are especially vulnerable to deforestation-driven changes in clouds depending on atmospheric moisture and aerosol loading.
- I've been in Pasadena for the past two days attending the last CAMP2Ex science team meeting! I gave an overarching talk summarizing the highlights of the work our group at CSU has been up to for the past five years since the field campaign.
- I volunteered at CSU Little Shop of Physics today. It was so much fun talking to K-12 students about the physics of the atmosphere!
- I gave a virtual seminar on aerosol breezes to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography's climate journal club.
- Our work on deforestation in Southeast Asia is featured in Eos magazine.
- I was in San Francisco for AGU! I gave a poster on the impacts of deforestation on clouds in Southeast Asia, and delivered a lightning talk on aerosol impacts on cold pools on behalf of Sue.
- You can read our latest preprint in the ESS Open Archive.
- I gave a guest lecture on the fundamentals of aerosol science to graduate-level Thermodynamics and Cloud Physics course at CSU Department of Atmospheric Science.
- I helped give a demonstration and guest lecture on using radiosondes to an undergraduate-level atmospheric science course at CSU.
- I attended a summer school in Pasadena hosted by JPL Center for Climate Sciences and the Keck Institute for Space Science. The theme was Using satellite observations to advance climate models.
- Our team just wrapped up on BACS-II. It was a very successful (and unusually rainy) summer for cold pool sampling!
- Today is the first day of the NSF-sponsored BioAerosols and Convective Storms Phase II (BACS-II). Our team will spend five weeks sampling cold pools using radiosondes and drones to understand how bioaerosols (like pollen) are lofted and distributed by storms. This summer, I'm the operations manager and will coordinate the day-to-day instrumentation and sampling.
- A paper by myself and coauthors was just publised in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Using a suite of 16 simulations, we explore how different aerosol types and loadings impact cloud development. We then discuss how these changes to the cloud field influence convective transport and aerosol removal processes.
- I passed my preliminary exam and am now officially a Ph.D. candidate!
- A paper I led was just publised in Nature Communications. We introduce the concept of an aerosol breeze, which is a mesoscale circulation driven by horizontal gradients in aerosol loadings. These results emphasize the importance of resolving spatial heterogeneity in assessing aerosol-cloud interactions.
- The CSU Little Shop of Physics was today! I and many other volunteers hosted science demonstrations (including showing off the drones we use for field measurements) for K-12 students.
- I received the Herbert Riehl Memorial Award for the paper 'Aerosol breezes drive cloud and precipitation increases', recently published in Nature Communications. The Riehl award is given annually to a CSU Department of Atmospheric Science student who submits the best manuscript for publication in the past 18 months, as selected by a panel of CSU faculty members.
- I helped out with an outreach event (en español!) at AXIS International Academy. We spoke to kindergarteners about weather, climate, and how we use drone to make measurements of the atmosphere!
- I attended the 103rd AMS Annual Meeting in Denver, CO. I gave a talk on the importance of representing heterogeneity in aerosol spatial distributions when considering aerosol-cloud interactions.
- I was awarded the David L. Dietrich Honorary Scholarship. This scholarship is awarded annually to a CSU Atmospheric Science student who demonstrates outstanding research in the study of aerosols and air quality.