Department of Atmospheric Sciences

Department scientists co-authored a paper in Nature that shows our current warming surpasses the magnitude and rate from any time over the last 24,000 years. The research used the Last Millennium Reanalysis that originates from our department. 

On the first day of the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Professors Dale Durran and Joel Thornton published “An imperative to act: Carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere takes ages to draw down” where they explain why CO2 is rising in our atmosphere today and why it will take centuries for natural processes to reverse the course. 

Please join us for an information session and Question & Answer panel with faculty and graduate students from the University of Washington’s Atmospheric Science Department. Applications to the graduate program are due December 1st. 

The UW Department of Atmospheric Sciences graduate program is now accepting applications for Autumn 2022! We welcome applications from all interested students and strive to build a graduate class having diverse scientific interests and backgrounds. 

Professor Dale Durran won the AISIS 2021 prize for outstanding contribution of relevance to society for his virtual talk “Can deep learning replace current numerical weather prediction models”
AISIS stands for “Artificial Intelligence for Science, Industry and Society”. 

Congratulations to postdoc Kinya Toride for recently publishing papers that show improvements in weather forecasts by assimilating water vapor isotopes in collaboration with University of Tokyo researchers.
GRL paper: https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL091698
Scientific reports paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-97476-0 

Congratulations to professor and chair, Cecilia Bitz, and professor Shuyi Chen for being honored by the AMS! Chen received the Sverdrup Gold Medal and Bitz received the Syukuro Manabe Climate Research Award. 

Congratulations to our undergraduates in the Atmospheric Sciences at UW for winning scholarships through the College of the Environment. We are proud of you!
Raphael Bakin and Ella Coleman won the Nancy Wilcox Endowed Scholarship
Melissa Mendoza won the Dani Elenga Environment Scholarship
Abigal King won the College of the Environment Scholarship 

Associate Professor Kyle Armour in Atmospheric Sciences and Oceanography at UW served as lead author of Chapter 7 on The Earth’s energy budget, climate feedbacks, and climate sensitivity, author of the Technical Summary, and contributing author of the Summary for Policy Makers. 

Congratulations to graduate student Benjamin Barr for earning a first place award on his oral presentation at the AMS Air-Sea Interactions Conference student competition in January this year. His presentation title was Interactive Processes Among Sea Spray, Enthalpy Flux, and Surface Layer Temperature and Humidity in Hurricanes.