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:

• EPS 81 | Extreme Weather and Climate (Spring 2023)
• EPS c181 | Atmospheric Physics and Dynamics (Fall 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, 2023)
• EPS 81 | Atmospheres (Spring 2019, 2020)
• EPS 198 | Careers in Earth and Planetary Science (Spring 2022)
• EPS 24 | Death by Water: Risk, Science, and Impacts of Hydrological Extremes (Fall 2017, 2019)
• EPS 290 | Global Circulation of Planetary Atmospheres (Fall 2020)
• Yale GG 765 | The General Circulation of Planetary Atmospheres (Spring 2012, 2015, 2017)
• Yale GG 322 | Physics of Weather and Climate (Fall 2011, 2013, 2014, 2016)
• Yale GG 570 | Cloud Physics and Dynamics, co-taught with Trude Storelvmo (Spring 2011, 2014)

Upcoming courses:

• EPS 81 | Extreme Weather and Climate (Spring 2024)
• EPS 198 | Careers in the Earth and Planetary Sciences and Beyond (Spring 2024)

WorldMonsoons.org, a website with educational pages and recent news about monsoons

Global track datasets of monsoon disturbances:

• Tracks in 5 atmospheric reanalyses compiled using an optimized algorithm, as described in Vishnu et al. (2020)
• Older dataset based on ERA-Interim data for 1979-2012, as described in Hurley and Boos (2015)

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.

There is an opening for a Ph.D. student to start in our group in Fall 2024, with applications due in early December 2023.