As the summer wraps up and preparations for another fall semester begin, I am thrilled to share some exciting news! My proposal for the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (NASA FINNEST) has been selected for funding, which take me through the remainder of my PhD program at UConn. The proposal, entitled “Refinement of Snow Microphysics and Density Forecasting Using GPM Ground Validation Observations and NU-WRF,” focuses on enhancing NASA’s regional modeling capabilities using the Weather Research Forceasting Model (WRF) for mid-latitude snow storms. The project will combine high resolution WRF simulations with NASA’s wide array of ground validation instruments, including their deployment at UConn, to evaluate how snow and its microphysical properties are resolved and forecasted in WRF. The final research component looks at improve our forecasting of the density of falling snow through physical processes that come directly from WRF output.

Thank you to both my advisors, Diego Cerrai and Marina Astitha, for their continued support and guidance of this proposal. I am looking forward to continue my work on this project and being a part of the NASA Earth Early Career Research team!

You can view the full abstract on NASA’s website, along with all the other selected proposals.

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.

This summer, I had the pleasure to work with scientists from NASA on the data collected from the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) ground validation campaign at UConn that occurred over the last two winters (in collaboration with the IMPACTS field campaign). We focused on final data preparation for the observations, and I specifically began thinking about how to combine the ground observations with data from the GPM’s core observatory for a March 4, 2023 event where an intense snowband passed over the observing sites about 10 minutes before the coinciding GPM overpass. In addition to this work, I am the lead author on a Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) article that is currently being written. Overall, this summer was a great learning experience, and I am looking forward to collaborating more with this group of people as we head into the fall semester!

Over the last 3 months, I have been taking an online class offered by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). This class went into great detail about different machine learning techniques and how they can be used in different weather and climate applications. It was a great opportunity to learn from some of the best and leading researchers in the world in this area, and I would highly recommend it for anyone trying to get into machine learning with weather and climate data!

Certificate_of_Completion

I recently attended the American Meteorological Society’s Annual Meeting in Denver, CO! It was great to catch up with old friends and colleagues and meet many new people. I was also there presenting my work that was done while I was at the University at Albany.

My talk, entitled Data Fusion: A Machine Learning Tool for Forecasting Winter Mixed Precipitation Events – Updates and Performance, was a part of the 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Science; this talk won an honorable mention award for oral presentations within this conference.

It was great to be able to present this work, and I am excited to go back to AMS in the future!

Click here to watch the Presentation or see the slides!