My New Postdoc

I started my postdoctoral position with the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) on September 1. My new work is somewhere between math and engineering, in the sense that I’m using a lot of prefab code to try to answer much more applied types of questions. In particular, I’m working on data assimilation for numerical weather prediction, which means that I am investigating methods of combining observations of weather related variables with a numerical model in some optimal way to produce a forecast that is more accurate than using the model alone. Data assimilation for severe storms is a hot topic at NSSL right now, with the eventual goal of giving short term forecasts of storms that could possibly produce tornadoes.

I’m using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model together with the DART data assimilation platform to investigate how best to use observations from a new type of remote sensor, called the AERI, to better forecast the conditions that will lead to the formation of severe storms. The AERI measures infrared radiation, which can be converted into measurements of temperature and humidity, which are crucial quantities for knowing where and when storms are going to initiate. There are lots of interesting questions to ask about these observations, which I hope to talk about more as I work through the first year of my research, but for now, I’ll just say how excited I am to be working on this project.