lightning

Attending AMS 2015 in Phoenix

MESAS students Warren Pettee and Thomas Winesett and I will be attending AMS 2015 (#AMS2015), along with many others from UNC Charlotte. I heard the count was about 8 undergraduate students from the Meteorology Program. Professor Casey Davenport and I will be the faculty representation at AMS – she and I make up 50% of our Meteorology faculty! Dr Davenport and I are also going to be a the AMS Career Fair with a big green UNC Charlotte table. We’ll be talking to anyone interested in learning more about the graduate and undergraduate programs in Atmospheric Sciences, Geology, Earth Sciences, and Geography at UNC Charlotte. Should be fun! Especially if we put out Andes mints.

For presentations, check my publications page for PDFs of the posters, but here is the summary with some images.

Thomas is presenting his poster twice, once at the AMS 14th Student Conference, and once at the AMS 7th Conference on the Meteorological Applications of Lightning Data (MALD) on Monday.

Thomas's AMS 2015 poster

Thomas’s AMS 2015 poster (co-authors are myself and Dr Dan Cecil, NASA MSFC)

Warren is presenting research about his version of WRF and how it performs for the February 2014 Snow Event in Charlotte at the Student Conference.

Warren's AMS 2015 poster (co-authors are myself and Professor Matt Eastin)

Warren’s AMS 2015 poster (co-authors are myself and Professor Matt Eastin)

I am presenting my paper, recently accepted for publication in JTECH, at the 20th Conference on Satellite Meteorology and Oceanography on Monday.

My AMS 2015 poster for the 20th SatMet conference.  Based on a paper that will be published at JTECH

My AMS 2015 poster for the 20th SatMet conference. Based on a paper that will be published at JTECH

Interactive USA wildfire map from Climate Central

Amazing what a team of scientists, techs, and a pile of data will bring you. I tried to embed a great map interface by the group at Climate Central here, but it didn’t work so here’s a screenshot of the information the interactive map provides when you zoom into one of the large fires affecting the USA right now (this one near Los Alamos, New Mexico).climatecentral-firemapGo to their widget here or to the more detailed posting about the widget here. Essentially, Climate Central is posting updated USA (or maybe North America) fire locations with really useful (and frightening) details as they roll in from daily reports by fire and land managers. Respect and praise for this great product of the intersection between science, technology, and public outreach. I wish the fire crews the best as they battle against an unforgiving enemy.

UNC Charlotte undergraduate research

Categories: Group News

The Meteorology Program here at UNC Charlotte is embedded in the Geography and Earth Sciences Department. We have solid core of undergraduate Meteorology BSc majors and coursework in the major is mostly supported by 4 faculty – Dr Adams, Dr Eastin, Mr Shirley, and myself. What has impressed me since I joined the faculty has been how often undergraduates are involved in research and independent study as they prepare for life after college.

I’ve been working with an undergraduate Meteorology major named Daniel Cunningham since July 2012 on a project about global lightning distributions – which is related to my fire research. Daniel has been working hard to keep up with coursework and the research project all year, and his efforts culminated in a nice finish in his senior year. He won 1st place for departmental research projects at the UNC Charlotte Undergraduate Research Conference! Here’s the department announcement. Daniel presented a poster called “Extending the Time Series of Satellite-Based Lightning Observations” – here’s a key figure he made with Panoply explaining what he did.

Global lightning map before D. Cunningham's research (top) and after (bottom).  Northern latitudes were completely missing before his project started.  Evaluation of the results are the next step.

Global lightning map before D. Cunningham’s research (top) and after (bottom). Northern latitudes were completely missing before his project started. Evaluation of the results are the next step.

This research has helped in many ways. Daniel was accepted into the University of Alabama Huntsville Atmospheric Sciences graduate program starting Fall 2013, he has picked up programming skills (Matlab), learned about statistical models of physical phenomena, learned how to mathematically explore large data set, how to make figures, and finally how to put together a prize-winning poster. Here is the UNC Charlotte announcement. Undergraduate research is how I got started on my long path to the faculty position here at UNC Charlotte. Perhaps not coincidentally, that undergraduate research was about lightning – I’ve returned to my roots.

Congratulations to Daniel. Also, on the theme of undergraduate research, three of our meteorology majors in total walked away with top awards. Brandy Stimac works with Dr Adams and Dr Eastin. Ricky Huff works with Dr Adams. Undergraduate research is strong in the Meteorology program! I’m looking forward to seeing graduation this year. I think the class size is about 10 students, and about 5 will go to graduate school, and 1 will be working to be a K-12 science teacher. Again, good numbers to see!

Presentations at AMS 2013

Both Daniel and I will be travelling to Austin Texas for the 2013 American Meteorological Society meeting. Thousands of students and scientists attend this meeting to discuss topics ranging from weather forecasting to climate modeling to air quality. My research on fire-climate interactions may not seem to fit at first, but one of the key inputs to my fire model is lightning and it turns out there is a very large number of presentations by experts in all aspects of lightning. That’s the group of scientists I’ll be presenting to in a talk called “The Role of Lightning in Simulations of the Spatiotemporal Distribution of Global Fire“. I’m looking forward to getting feedback from the people who study lightning more rigorously than I do. Daniel will present “Extending the Time Series of Satellite-Based Lightning Observations” as a poster at the AMS student conference. This is the research he is doing for his Honors thesis.

More lightning and fire research

Daniel Cunningham will continue his research from the CRS program during the 2012-13 academic year with Dr Magi in the form of Independent Study. He presented a poster at the CRS Symposium on 25 July 2012 and discussed his research experience with a China-US exchange program at UNC Charlotte as well. We plan to move the research forward and present our results at the AMS Annual Meeting in January 2013.

Examining Geospatial Correlations in Lightning Frequency

Categories: Research News

Cross posted from Charlotte Research Scholars blog.

The goal of our research this summer is to explore the possible correlations between lightning frequencies below 40˚N and above 40˚N in the boreal regions of Canada. We are using 15 years of lightning data measured from instruments on NASA satellites.

During the first two weeks of the program I read journal articles related to the satellite instruments and learned about different ways to explore large datasets. I learned how to use a program called Panoply to study the full 15 years of data (Figures 1-2 are from Panoply), and am now learning about MatLab, a program that can be used to calculate statistics for large datasets. Devoted global lightning observation began in 1995 with the Optical Transient Detector (OTD) aboard the MicroLab-1 satellite (Figure 1), but this detector fell out of orbit in 2000.

Figure 1

A second lightning detector, called the Lightning Imager Sensor (LIS) on the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) satellite, has been collecting data since 1998 and is still in operation. LIS collects lightning data between 40˚S and 40˚N (Figure 2). As a result, there is a gap in the data above 40˚N after 2000, which can be seen by comparing Figures 1 and 2.

Figure 2

Using MatLab, I hope to determine whether correlations exist between the latitudes with data from 1996-present and the latitudes with data from 1996-2000. I can then use the statistical relationships to extrapolate the dataset beyond the year 2000.

— Daniel Cunningham

Charlotte Research Scholars 2012

Categories: Group News

Daniel Cunningham (junior in Meteorology BSc program) is one of the 50 UNC Charlotte undergraduates selected from a pool of over 170 applicants to receive funding for summer research from the inaugural Charlotte Research Scholars (CRS) program, sponsored by UNC Charlotte Academic Affairs. Daniel will be working with Dr Magi from June-July 2012 on a project titled ‘Lightning and Fires’. We will work on enhancing a lightning dataset, test a couple of hypotheses, and develop a better understanding of how lightning and fire interact. More news as it develops, but congrats to Daniel!