Our group’s research focuses on large-scale climate dynamics—we work to understand how atmospheric circulations, ocean interactions, radiative transfer, and land surface processes control regional and global climate. Some of our research centers on monsoons, which are continental-scale atmospheric circulations that deliver water to billions of people in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and northern Australia; monsoon winds also constitute a major component of Earth’s global atmospheric circulation. We also study extreme weather and climate phenomena, seeking to understand how fluid dynamics and thermodynamics govern the behavior of atmospheric vortices, heat waves, and intense precipitation. We pay particular attention to the phase changes of water in Earth’s atmosphere, as the interaction of precipitating clouds with planetary-scale flow is one of the central unresolved problems of planetary science. In all of our work, we combine theory, observational analyses, and numerical models to discover how the world around us works.
Previous courses:
Upcoming courses:
WorldMonsoons.org, a website with educational pages and recent news about monsoons
Global track datasets of monsoon disturbances:
Somali jet index, a measure of the strength of the South Asian monsoon circulation, and of roughly 30 percent of the global cross-equatorial flow
South Asian vertical shear index, the strength of the vertical shear of the zonal wind over South Asian. This was developed by Webster and Yang (1992, QJRMS) as a measure of the strength of the South Asian monsoon circulation.
Output from an idealized quasi-global aquaplanet model run without a convective parameterization (through use of the hypohydrostatic rescaling), from our paper that used this model to study the response of extreme precipitation to uniform surface warming.
Moist energy balance model, written in Python by Henry Peterson and used in Peterson and Boos (2020) to analyze the influence of radiative feedbacks and eddy diffusivity on tropical rainfall shifts.
We have finished evaluating applications for the open Ph.D. student position in the Climate Dynamics group and won’t be admitting more students this cycle. There will be a similar opening next year, with a start date in Fall 2024 and application deadline in late 2023.