Climate Student Wins Best Poster Award
Climate Dynamics doctoral student Kai Huang won First Place in a Student Poster Presentation at the 11th Symposium on the Madden-Julian Oscillation and Sub-Seasonal Monsoon Variability. The conference was part of the 103rd Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) in January 2023.
Huang’s presentation was “Captured QBO-MJO Connection in the CESM2 Subseasonal Prediction System with a Stratospheric Nudging.” The work was done in collaboration with Jadwiga Richter of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and former Mason faculty member (and Climate Dynamics alumn) Kathy Pegion.
The Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) is a wave of tropical convective activity that travels along the equator and influences weather around the world. The QBO is the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation, a change in tropical winds that occurs in the lower stratosphere, the region of the atmosphere above about 12 km altitude. The QBO is found to strongly influence the MJO activity in the observations. But such connection has been missing in current generation weather and climate models. The poster, for the first time, confirms the forecast model’s potential ability to reproduce the observed QBO-MJO connection.
