Recently, the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) Annual Meeting concluded in Baltimore, MD. This year’s meeting was a great time as I was able to reconnect with old friends and colleagues as well as meet numerous new friends and collaborators. I presented 2 separate oral presentations based on some of our recent work; you can see the presentation slides in the Research tab.

First, I presented a method of improving our winter outage predictions models; we create an impact based scale connecting snow density, one of the most important predictors of winter outages, and the number of power outages. This provided benefit to the model, especially for the areas with wet snow. We are continue to refine this index and improve our winter model.

Second, I presented an overview of our Global Precipitation Measurement Mission Ground Validation Campaign. Over the last 3 years, we have observed over 90+ storms with a variety of ground instrumentation focusing on radar and microphysics observations; these are very important for verifying and developing satellite algorithms. We also have a BAMS article in review about this that I wrote, so keep an eye out for that in the near future.

In other news, I passed my PhD Qualifying Exam in early January pushing me towards my PhD candidacy! Now the work begins on refining my PhD research which will focus on winter storms and snow microphysics.