A snapshot in time of a numerically simulated supercell thunderstorm including reflectivity, surface cold pool, and selected streamlines (using a forward integration). It was rendered using Vapor.
Welcome to my research page, which describes some of my current work. I am an Associate Professor of Atmospheric Sciences in the Geology Department of Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant. My research deals with the numerical simulation of supercell thunderstorms and thunderstorm outflows.
The goal of the supercell research is to better understand the fine-scale internal structure of the supercell, and more specifically, the process of tornado formation in supercells. We still really don't understand how tornadoes form, or why they form in one storm and not another. One way to approach the problem is to simulate a tornado-producing supercell thunderstorm and see what happens in the model. This is difficult for several reasons, one of which is that this requires enourmous computational resources. Even when we do get a tornado to form, figuring out what happened in the model is quite a challenge!
I keep an occasional work-related journal here. If you poke around the archives you can find some neat pictures as well as some of my modeling trials and tribulations.
Below is a snapshot from a video I put together called "Supercell on a Carousel" which explores the inner structure of a simulated supercell during a snapshot in time. The video itself is below.
If you are looking for some supplementary mateiral from the 24th Conference on Severe Local Storms, the remaining animations and images are from the simulation described at the conference.
Below is a snapshot from an animation of tornadogenesis. The blue tube is the tornado (volume rendered pressure deficit), the grey isosurface is the updraft, and the wind vectors represent storm-relative velocities. The bottom colored transparent surface is potential temperature perturbation, where blue is cold and red is warm.
Below is a series of horizontal slices (181 meters above ground) of different fields during the tornado. The top left image is similar to what a radar scan look like if the radar were near the storm. That's quite a hook echo!
Below is a 3D volume rendering of reflectivity along with surface potential temperature and white isosurface of pressure deficit during the tornado.
