I am a second year masters student working with Dr. Robert Rauber. My research focuses investigating the manifestation of elevated potential instability (EPI) within the comma head of wintertime extratropical cyclones in the eastern United States. When elevated convection results from EPI, heavy snowfall and, in some cases, thunder snow occurs. I am analyzing model data along side airborne X and W-band radar data from 19 storms sampled during the Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms (IMPACTS) field campaign. Elevated convection is visible in vertically pointing radars as convective towers and in model data where equivalent potential temperature decreases with height. Properties of EPI in radar and model data are statistically composited over multiple cyclones to determine how EPI develops and occurs in multiple cyclones. 

As an undergraduate student, I worked with Dr. Robert Rauber to analyze airborne W-band radar data from the Seeded and Natural Wintertime Orographic Clouds: the Idaho Experiment (SNOWIE). Within wintertime orographic clouds during SNOWIE there were transient and fixed, orographically-forced vertical circulations that ranged in size and strength. Trajectories of ice particles were run through vertical cross sections of vertical motions from a 900 m WRF simulation and vertical motion derived from the W-band vertical Doppler radial velocity to assess the impact of transient features on the trajectories of ice particles created by cloud seeding.

Outside of winter storm research, I held an internship with the National Severe Storms Laboratory under Dr. Harold Brooks and Dr. Kimberly Hoogewind where we used self-organizing maps of 500 mb daily ensemble mean heights from the 20th Century Reanalysis Dataset Version 3 to determine the efficiency of height patterns at producing tornado days. I was a student volunteer during the 2022 season of Propagation, Evolution, and Rotation in Linear Storms (PERiLS) where I launched weather balloons in the field.