research

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

Resources to understand global warming

There is a treasure trove of information and misinformation about global warming on the mighty internet. I try to sift through these as I prepare for effective ways to empower students or at least generate discussion. Here are a couple of new-ish resources that visualize the NASA GIStemp gridded temperature anomaly data set, which are described in great detail on that website but also in the peer-reviewed science literature. The New Scientist (UK popular science magazine) created this webapp to allow anyone to point and click on a location to see how the temperature has changed since about 1890. Here’s a snippet of the Southeast USA anomaly averaged from 1893-1912 warming-southeast-1890and then from 1993-2012 warming-southeast-2000The global warming trend is presented on the right side, while the temperature trend for the specific location is right above it. What’s really nice is the pop-up window that the app opens when you hover over that location-specific temperature trend. You can see the data that’s plotted! Admittedly, it’s pretty easy to get from NASA GISS as indicated via the links on the webapp itself, but still, it’s a great effort by the New Scientist to make sure any person who wants to can reproduce the analysis. And, most importantly, the app itself is a really accessible way to “see” global warming. Other temperature data sets (HadCRU, NOAA NCDC, and a couple of others) have trends that are very similar to NASA GISS – if I find a link showing this comparison, I will post it.