PhD Summer Awards
Two Climate Dynamics PhD students were awarded fellowships for Summer 2020. First-year student Kai Huang has been accepted into the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) 2020 ASP Graduate Visitor Program. While there, he will work with NCAR scientist Yaga Richter to evaluate MJO simulation and prediction in the Community Earth System Model (CESM1).
The MJO is the Madden-Julian oscillation, a region of intensified atmospheric convection which drifts eastward along the equator and influences weather as far north as the United States. Huang’s work at NCAR dovetails with work by his advisor, Dr. Kathy Pegion, and others in AOES on using MJO and other phenomena to improve long-range (sub-seasonal) weather predictions.
Abdullah al-Fahad was awarded a Summer Research Fellowship to work on his doctoral dissertation. His work, advised by Dr. Natalie Burls, investigates links between bands of strong rainfall in the tropics and the Subtropical Highs, large regions of clear sky at the edges of the tropics in both northern and southern hemisphere. Fahad’s work aims, among other things, to better understand how the subtropical highs may change due to global heating due to society’s emissions of atmospheric pollutants.
