Yale University

Faculty and project mentor

My research interests are in planetary climates, with a focus on hydrologic cycles and the factors that control their behavior and evolution over time. I am especially interested in the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan, which closely resembles Earth's in many ways but at the same time is entirely alien: Titan hosts convective clouds of methane, stratospheric clouds of ethane and many other hydrocarbons and nitriles. More information on my research can be found here.

University of Washington

Faculty lecturer

Dargan studies simple models of climate, including tropical and extratropical dynamics, convection and clouds, and models of emissions to global temperature.

University of Chicago

Project mentor

My research interests are in the large-scale circulation of the atmosphere, transport and mixing, diabatic sources of Rossby waves.

University of Chicago

Faculty and project mentor

Prof. Shaw’s research focuses on the physics of the atmosphere and climate system past, present and future. She seeks to understand the underlying mechanisms controlling the response to climate changes so that we can have greater confidence in future projections. Her approach combines theory (primarily conservation laws), numerical modeling across a hierarchy of complexity and observational data analysis.

University of Chicago

Project mentor

My research interests fall in two main threads. The first includes the use of the isotopic composition of atmospheric water vapor as a tracer of convective processes, cirrus formation, and stratosphere-troposphere exchange; and the design of spectroscopic techniques for in-situ trace gas measurements. The second includes climate (and human) response to greenhouse-gas forcing; development of tools for impacts assessment; statistical emulation of climate model output; and climate and energy policy evaluation.

University of California, Davis

Faculty and project mentor

My research interests are in the physics of rainstorms and atmospheric circulations in a changing climate. I am particularly interested in what environmental factors control the temporal and spatial scales of rainstorms, how will the characteristic scales of rainstorms change in a warmer climate, and how the collective effects of individual rainstorms, in turn, shape Earth's climate.

California Institute of Technology

Keynote speaker

Tapio studies atmospheric dynamics, both here on Earth and on other planets, on scales from clouds to the globe. His research aims to elucidate fundamental questions about climate such as: What controls the surface temperatures and winds? What shapes rainfall patterns? Where and when do clouds form in the atmosphere? He is currently leading the Climate Modeling Alliance, whose mission is to build the first Earth system model that automatically learns from diverse data sources to produce accurate climate predictions.

University of Chicago

Faculty and project mentor

My research aims to improve our understanding of the dynamics of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the coupled climate system. I am particularly interested in the processes that govern the transport of heat and other constituents in the ocean. Understanding the mechanisms of these transport processes is key to our understanding of changes in the climate system during Earth’s past and future. I tackle these questions using a combination of theoretical fluid dynamics, numerical simulations and analysis of observational data.

University of Chicago

Project mentor

I am a planetary geoscientist who studies the evolution of rocky planets, with emphasis on Mars and rocky exoplanets. My research statement can be found here.

University of Michigan

Faculty and project mentor

I’m interested in moist convection in planetary atmospheres. Moist convection refers to convection powered by latent heating or evaporative cooling from condensable species like H2O, NH3 or CH4. In Earth’s atmosphere, water vapor is lighter than the background air and in Jovian atmospheres, water vapor is heavier than hydrogen and helium. Sunlight reaches the bottom of the Earth’s atmosphere while it is dark in Jovian atmosphere below 1 bar pressure level. Precipitation reaches the ground on Earth but precipitation will evaporate away on Jupiter. Given all those differences, would moist convection be significantly different on Earth-like planets than on Jupiter-like planets?

I’m trying to answer the following “big” questions. 1) Is moist convection the dominant way of heat transport on giant planets? 2) What is the mean profile of condensable species under radiative-convective equilibrium? 3) What is the role of moist convection in the evolution of planetary atmospheres?

I combine data analysis with numerical modeling to answer these questions. The data come from the recent Juno microwave observation of Jupiter’s atmosphere and the model is written by myself.

Stanford University

Faculty and project mentor

I study organized deep convection and the feedbacks between severe storms and the climate. I’m interested in atmospheric dynamics and moist thermodynamics, with a particular focus on tropical cyclones (hurricanes) and supercell thunderstorms. I use theory and numerical modeling at a range of scales to better understand how these storms interact with the large-scale climate, and how they may change in a warmer world. Can small scale, highly nonlinear storm dynamics affect the energy budget of the planet? I focus on producing hypotheses and predictions that are falsifiable by observations with existing technology.