Speaker: Da Yang, Stanford
Title: "From Rising Air to Basin-Wide Rainstorms"
Abstract:
Atmospheric convection and clouds are among the largest sources of uncertainty in predicting future climate change and extreme weather events. Basic questions in the field include: What makes air rise to form clouds? How do individual convective clouds organize into large-scale rainfall patterns? How does convection respond to climate warming? In this talk, I will present our recent efforts toward answering these questions by integrating theory, observations, a hierarchy of numerical models, and machine learning methods. Time permitting, I will also introduce our recent work on atmospheric rivers — powerful weather systems that bring strong winds and heavy precipitation to the west coast of North America — highlighting a vapor kinetic energy diagnostic framework and the use of microseisms as a novel observational constraint.
Bio: Da Yang is an Assistant Professor of Geophysics at Stanford University. His research interests are in the physics of rainstorms and atmospheric circulations in a changing climate. He is particularly interested in what environmental factors control the temporal and spatial scales of rainstorms, how will the characteristic scales of rainstorms change in a warmer climate, and how the collective effects of individual rainstorms, in turn, shape Earth's climate.
In person attendance at this seminar is only open to Columbia University affiliates.