Steve Nesbitt

Prof. Nesbitt is a Professor and Head of the Department of Climate, Meteorology, and Atmospheric Sciences (CliMAS) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  He leads a research group comprised of research staff, graduate students and undergraduate researchers in CliMAS, where his research and teaching interests reside in radar meteorology, satellite meteorology, tropical meteorology, mesoscale meteorology, and data science.  His work has contributed to the understanding of processes involving deep convective systems and high-impact weather, measurements of and processes within global precipitation systems using satellites, processes in winter storms and snowfall, and understanding precipitation systems in complex orography.

Prof. Nesbitt has participated in over 20 field experiments; notably he was the lead Principal Investigator of the NSF/NOAA/NASA RELAMPAGO (Remote sensing of Electrification, Lightning, And Mesoscale/microscale Processes with Adaptive Ground Observations) field campaign, which observed convective storms in central Argentina alongside the DOE CACTI (Clouds, Aerosols, and Complex Terrain Interactions) field campaign, which he served as a Co-Lead Investigator.  He is co-author of the 2018 textbook Radar Meteorology, A First Course. He has received several awards, including the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship, the NASA New Investigator Program award, the NASA Robert H. Goddard award for scientific achievement, and named a Distinguished Visitor of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina for international cooperation. He was named a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 2025.