Recent news

December 2023

Gave two talks at the 2023 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco:

  • The Physical Origin of Tropical Congestus Clouds in the "Atmospheric Convection: Processes, Dynamics, and Links to Weather and Climate" session;
  • A Proposal for the Origin of Oscillating Convection in Planetary Atmospheres in the "Atmospheres, Climate, and Potential Habitability of Rocky Exoplanets" session.

November 2023

Accepted a post-doctoral fellowship in the EPSS Department at UCLA. I am leading new research into tropical storms, clouds, and precipitation at climate extremes.

October 2023

April 2023

My first-author paper about the impacts of varying moisture on climate, clouds, and convection is published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences

Research portfolio

The origin of tropical congestus clouds

Congestus clouds are one of the 3 major cloud populations in the tropics and are particularly important in the context of the local climate, producing 25-40% of the total precipitation. On average, congestus clouds reach heights of 5-6 km, and therefore are the “middle child” with respect to their smaller sibling the fair-weather cumulus cloud and their larger sibling the stormy cumulonimbus cloud. As lead author of a newly submitted study, we show that the height at which congestus cloud tops form is directly related to the ability of the atmosphere to radiatively cool.

Relaxation-oscillator convection on Earth and Titan

The global-mean precipitation rate on Earth today is remarkably steady, indicating that moist convection – that is, air motion involving the condensation of water – is an ongoing process across the globe. If the Earth were 30 Celsius warmer, the weather would oscillate between intense downpours and quiescent, dry periods. Like a metronome, the storms that bring the torrential rains would materialize and dissipate at regular intervals. As lead author of a new study (in revision at PSJ), we show that the critical temperature at which these oscillating storms erupt is predicted by the breakdown of a thermodynamic heat engine (not unlike the one in your car) model of convection.

Effects of saturation vapor pressure on climate, clouds, and convection

One might reasonably expect that a planet with more moisture in its atmosphere would have more clouds. This assumption is contradicted by Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. Titan’s atmosphere is of a comparable density to Earth’s and composed primarily of nitrogen. Earth and Titan are the only two bodies in the solar system where it rains at the surface. Titan is so cold that the substance that forms clouds and precipitation on Titan is methane (commonly known as natural gas). Titan also stores over 100 times more “moisture” in its atmosphere than Earth. Despite this, clouds cover less than 1% of Titan’s surface in the annual-mean (the same statistic is close to 70% for Earth). These observations of Earth and Titan motivated a comparative study of the effects of moisture on climate.