student 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

Funded graduate research assistant for fire modeling project

This is an advertisement I am circulating around to listserves and colleagues to recruit a graduate student (Masters or PhD) into my recently-funded NSF research project. The grant title is “Collaborative Research: Testing Hypotheses About Fire Using Data Syntheses and Fire Modeling” and I am working with researchers at Yale University (Dr Jenn Marlon) and University of Oregon (Dr Bart Bartein) to better understand questions related to the intersection of global fire modeling and paleofire data. The NSF public project summary is here. The recruiting ad is below. Please consider applying! Email if you have questions, or I’d be happy to meet with you at SEDAAG (Athens, GA), AMS (Phoenix, AZ), or AAG (Chicago, IL). Thanks!

Dr. Brian Magi is seeking a graduate student to join the Multidisciplinary Earth System and Atmospheric Sciences (MESAS) research group in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (mesas.uncc.edu). The student will develop research within the context of an NSF funded project focused on studying how global fire modeling can use past and present data to investigate the interactions between fire, climate, and land-use change over a range of time scales. Students will join a multi-institution research team and will engage with an international effort to improve our ability to understand and model fire in the Earth system.

Applicants may apply as a Masters student, or, if they hold an MS degree, as a PhD student. Regardless, applicants should have at least one degree in atmospheric sciences, geography, earth system science, or related field in the physical sciences. The ideal candidate will have a strong quantitative background and computer programming experience, as well as interest in interdisciplinary topics related to climate-human dimensions of global fire activity.

The funded position is available for 2 years, includes tuition, and starts in August 2015. To apply, please email Dr. Brian Magi (brian dot magi at uncc dot edu) a cover letter describing your research interests, goals, and relevant experience, a CV, unofficial college transcripts, GRE scores, and contact information for three references. Questions should be sent to the same email address.

Review of applications will begin immediately and the position will remain open until a suitable candidate is found. After the selection, the successful candidate will apply to be admitted to appropriate UNC Charlotte graduate program; detailed information about the application procedure to the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences is available online (geoearth.uncc.edu).

Science meeting in Austin Texas

If you’re an undergraduate in physics, math, or a related field, and thinking about graduate school options, my colleague Professor Manda Adams and I will be in Austin, Texas from January 5-11 2013 for the American Meteorological Society Student Conference and for the full professional conference. Send me an email if you want to meet up and talk about grad school at UNC Charlotte! Also, I will be presenting some of my research in global fire modeling on Thursday from 9:30-9:45am in this session. My presentation will be about the role that satellite-based lightning data plays in global fire modeling.

AMS Student Assistantship

Categories: Group News

Daniel Cunningham received the Student Assistantship award for AMS 2013 in January. so he’ll get room and board in a hotel right next to the conference for the whole week of the conference. This is in addition to his presentation at the AMS 2013 Student conference. Congratulations!

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!