How do people and organizations respond to extreme weather events—in particular, flash floods? Flash floods are already on average the leading cause of weather-related fatalities in the United States and second most common worldwide.
Dione Lee Rossiter, University of California, Santa Cruz • This Ph.D. student studies clouds, especially over the subtropical ocean—the area just north and south of the tropics. She's interested in their invisible physical changes, or microphysics, and a whole lot more.
This spring the second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX2, or V2) captured one tornado in unprecedented detail, as well as a number of potentially tornadic thunderstorms that never made the grade.
Eleven days can go by in no time, but their brevity was accentuated for 27 graduate students at a summer colloquium on 1–12 June. The goal was to give students a taste of fieldwork by having them organize and conduct mini–field experiments and draw meaningful results from the data.
A team of NCAR researchers led by Jacob Fugal is developing and testing a specialized instrument that uses digital holography to measure tiny cloud droplets.
Using a highly efficient modeling technique, Pablo Ortiz (University of Granada) and Piotr Smolarkiewicz (ESSL/MMM) have simulated the role of winds in forming sand dunes and sandholes.
The largest and most ambitious tornado study in history will begin next week, as dozens of scientists deploy radars and other ground-based instruments across the Great Plains to gain a better understanding of these often deadly weather events.
The 2008 Super Tuesday tornado outbreak swept through several southern states and the lower Ohio Valley, killing 57 people. NCAR scientist Julie Demuth helped the National Weather Service assess the societal impacts of the deadly storms.
NCAR scientist Fei Chen is collaborating with colleagues at China’s Institute of Urban Meteorology to explore how growth in Beijing is changing the city’s summer rainfall patterns, focusing specifically on the relationship between urban expansion, aerosols, and summer rainfall.
While there has been much attention focused on the question of whether climate change influences hurricanes, scientists are also interested in whether the reverse holds true: do hurricanes significantly impact global climate?
Accurate, high-resolution weather forecasts are a critical part of wind energy production. In December, UCAR signed an agreement with Xcel Energy to develop a wind prediction system for the company’s wind energy farms in Colorado, Minnesota, and Texas.
Several red-eye commercial flights were rocked by moderate to severe turbulence as they flew across northeast Kansas early on June 17, 2005. A new study by NCAR scientists Stan Trier and Bob Sharman uses modeling to connect storms in Oklahoma with the Kansas turbulence.
A new UCAR COMET Program course, Weather and Health, will help meteorologists and others broaden their understanding of the impacts of weather and climate on public health.
NCAR, working with federal agencies and universities as well as the insurance and energy industries, has launched an intensive study to examine how global warming will influence hurricanes in the next few decades.
Andrea Sealy, NCAR's Advanced Study Program • If you are from the Caribbean and you're good at math and science, the advice you get is to become a doctor, says Sealy. "But I never liked biology much," she adds. Now she's a researcher at the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology.
Mountain pine beetles appear to be doing more than killing large swaths of forests in the Rocky Mountains. Scientists suspect they are also altering local weather patterns and air quality.
This year is proving unusually active for Atlantic storms. The hurricane season is only at its midpoint, but already there have been 10 named storms—which is the average number for an entire year.
Dramatic year-to-year temperature swings and a century-long warming trend across West Antarctica are linked to conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean, according to a new analysis of ice cores conducted by scientists at NCAR and the University of Washington (UW).
James Done, NCAR's Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division • A meteorologist, Done examines weather forecasts generated by computer models to better understand severe weather and long-term climate change. Recently, that has meant homing in on tropical meteorology and hurricanes.
People living near vulnerable creeks and rivers along the Front Range may soon get advance notice of potentially deadly flash floods, thanks to a new forecasting system being tested this summer by NCAR.
In an attempt to create a favorable environment for this summer's Olympic Games in Beijing, Chinese officials hope to influence local weather conditions and air quality.
The first comprehensive analysis of observed and projected changes in weather and climate extremes in North America and U.S. territories was released today.
Commercial operators, governments, and academic researchers worldwide are engaging in cloud seeding and other weather modification projects to try to influence local conditions.
