Please join us for this year’s Graduate Student Distinguished Visiting Lecture on Wednesday May 10, 2023, at 7:00 pm. We are pleased to welcome Professor Adam Sobel of Columbia University.

Register Here

Lecture: “Climate Risk Science: An Applied Field in Need of Synthesis and Theory”

Professor Adam Sobel, Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Engineering School
When: Wednesday May 10, 2023, 7:00-8:30 p.m.
Where: Johnson Hall 102*

* A recording of the lecture will be available to those who register for the event

About the Speaker

Adam Sobel is a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Engineering School. He studies the dynamics of climate and weather phenomena, particularly in the tropics. In recent years he has become particularly interested in understanding the risks to human society from extreme weather events and climate change, which will be the basis for his public lecture at UW on May 10, 2023.

Prof. Sobel’s research spans basic and applied prediction and risk assessment, and uses observations, theory, and numerical simulations with models spanning a hierarchy in complexity. He is author or co-author of over 150 peer-reviewed scientific articles; a popular book, Storm Surge, about Hurricane Sandy; and numerous op-eds. He is particularly interested in the interactions between turbulent deep convection and large-scale atmospheric dynamics, as these are key to the qualitative and quantitative understanding and prediction of many modes of atmospheric behavior, including extreme precipitation events. He has developed novel methods for diagnosing these interactions, connecting high-resolution explicit simulations of cloud systems to simple theoretical representations of large-scale dynamics in order to extract essential mechanisms and understand the connections between weather and climate. In another line of work, with colleagues in both academia and the insurance industry, Sobel has been developing hybrid statistical-dynamical models, combining mechanistic understanding with inference from observational data, to assess the risk of rare but extremely damaging extreme weather events, particularly tropical cyclones, tornadoes, and hail.

Prof. Sobel has received the Meisinger Award (2010) and Louis J. Battan Author’s Award (2014) from the American Meteorological Society, the Ascent Award from the Atmospheric Sciences Section of the American Geophysical Union (2014), and the Lamont-Doherty Award for Excellence in Mentoring (2010).