SOARS Manuscripts

Southern Terrebonne parish is home to a community of people that live off of the land and water that shares a unique connection to their environment. Unfortunately, the loss of their land due to land dynamics such as subsidence, sea level rise and salt-water intrusion is seldom recognized outside th…

Weather conditions in one region can often be linked to conditions in another region thousands of miles away. These long-distance relationships are known as teleconnections and play a large role in our ocean-atmosphere system, including global weather patterns. Some recurring deviations, or anomalie…

Understanding the Suns processes and how they affect the Earth allows us to better understand climate change, main sequence stars, and aids in the understanding and prediction of space weather. The need for accurate space weather forecasting increases as our dependence on satellite communication and…

The Colorado Coarse Rural Urban Sources and Health (CCRUSH) study is a three-year study focused on characterizing the mass, composition and sources of coarse particulate matter (PM10-2.5) in urban and rural Colorado and evaluating how differences may be associated with several health outcomes. As pa…

Understanding magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling is important because energy transfer from the magnetosphere to the ionosphere needs to be represented. This work examines the High Altitude Observatory (HAO)'s high latitude empirical model that represents magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling as energy tr…

Active remote sensors have various applications, from air pollution studies to defense uses. However, investing in new sensors can be expensive especially if the success of the instrument is not guaranteed. A relatively inexpensive alternative to field testing is numerical simulation. Our numerical …

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas with uncertainty regarding the strengths and trends of various individual sources. These uncertainties make it difficult for researchers to determine the exact reasons behind methane's variable annual growth rate and the stabilization of the atmospheric concentra…

Climate change has contributed to global sea level rise. However, in situ measurements and satellite observations indicate that this increase is not uniform over the tropical Indo-Pacific basin. Furthermore, satellite altimetry data documented large-scale decadal variations in sea level over much of…

The North American monsoon (NAM), characterized by distinct seasonal precipitation over western Mexico and the Southwestern United States, is a summertime phenomenon that depends on complex interactions between the Pacific Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and the North American land mass. Thus, the NAM is str…

One of the challenges of tropical cyclone prediction is the lack of observations over the ocean. One powerful new source of data is the global positioning system (GPS) radio occultation (RO), which can provide valuable information about the moisture distribution over the ocean. In this study we asse…

Thunderstorms and other electrified, non-lightning producing clouds are thought to play an important role in maintaining the potential difference between Earth's surface and upper atmosphere. These clouds are responsible for producing Wilson currents between cloud tops in the troposphere and the ele…

Studies have shown that about 63% of deaths in the U.S. due to tropical cyclones between 1970- 1999 occurred inland. The main cause of these deaths is freshwater flooding often associated with severe local storms spawned from the parent cyclone. In addition, these storms can produce numerous and wid…

On May 2, 2008, Tropical Cyclone Nargis killed over 130,000 people in southern Myanmar making it the 8th deadliest cyclone of all time. A better understanding of the mechanisms in the early stages of development of tropical cyclones, such as the role of latent and sensible heat fluxes from the ocean…

Our surface transportation infrastructure and the public who use it are becoming increasingly vulnerable to severe weather conditions. Statistics show that 24% of all United States highway crashes are weather-related and each year, nearly 7,400 people are killed and over 673,000 people are injured i…

Bulk microphysical (MP) parameterizations describe the processes by which water and ice particles grow and precipitate within a cloud. These schemes allow models to represent cloud processes that occur on the microscale and cannot be properly resolved. Uncertainties in climate simulations and operat…

Ozone (O₃) is harmful to breathe at the surface and acts as a greenhouse gas in the upper troposphere. It has become important to understand how O₃ is distributed throughout the troposphere and how its distribution changes with time. This study focused on variations of O₃ in the tropical upper tropo…

Convection-permitting models provide useful forecast guidance on expected convective mode, but often struggle to accurately forecast timing and location for small-scale and extreme events. Additionally, with horizontal grid spacing on the order of 1-4 km, small-scale convective features and severe w…

Concerns about fossil fuel supplies and an ever-increasing demand for energy have prompted the search for alternative power sources. One option is the ocean, a power-dense and renewable source of energy; but its capacity to meet human energy demands is poorly understood. While raw wave energy resour…

Understanding and accurately sampling microphysical cloud properties for orographic-forced mixed-phase is of crucial importance for an enhanced representation of mixed-phase clouds in global climate models. The Forward Scattering Spectrometer Probe (FSSP) has been the most widely used instrument to …

Recent research has shown that predecessor rain events (PREs), regions of heavy rainfall that occur well in advance of recurving tropical cyclones (TCs), can enhance mid-latitude precipitation. Since numerical weather prediction serves as a key component in developing precipitation forecasts, it is …

Seasonal changes in leaf area index (LAI) are an important factor in determining radiative transfers, and ecosystem exchanges between the land and atmosphere components of the Community Land Model (CLM). Thus, striving for more accurate vegetation simulations will yield more realistic results from t…

Energetic electrons in the upper atmosphere influence atmospheric dynamics and ionize chemical species; these processes ultimately affect the atmosphere's chemical composition. Two important chemical constituents affected by electron ionization are HOx and NOx, whose presence and mechanisms contribu…

Rapid intensification (RI) is a form of tropical cyclone (TC) intensification that is particularly challenging to predict. Understanding RI is essential for improving hurricane intensity forecast skill and hurricane preparedness. However, the physical processes that lead to RI are not well understoo…

Mid-level mesoscale vortices impact warm-season precipitation over the United States (US), due to their ability to initiate and focus deep convection. Given their significance to forecasting, it is important to understand these mesoscale vortices, their frequency, and their impact on subsequent conv…

As the issue of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, becomes more prevalent in studying land-climate interactions, models that accurately represent vegetation are critically important since plants store and emit large amounts of CO₂. Recent studies note that climate models fail to reproduc…