Department of Atmospheric Sciences

The UW College of the Environment is pleased to announce that Cecilia Bitz has been named chair of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, effective July 1, 2019. Congratulations! 

“It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but on the one hand, this change is kind of large and not all homogeneous,” Thornton said. “The changes are not all 2 degrees.” 

Congratulations to Sunghoon ‘Chris’ Park. He received his BS in Atmospheric Sciences in June 2018 and has been selected for Officer Training School with the US Air Force for the position of Weather Officer. 

Congratulations goes Jane Harrell an undergraduate student who was awarded the NSF GRFP.  Dave Bonan, Claire Buysse, Carley Fredrickson, Daniel Lloveras, Jamin Rader and Adam Sokol who received Honorable Mention. 

Tsubasa worked with Prof. Dennis Hartmann and graduated with his PhD in 2017. He then went on to the University of Tokyo as a postdoctoral researcher and has now recently accepted a faculty position at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo! 

Abigail L. S. Swann, Associate Professor, University of Washington, Department of Atmospheric Sciences and Department of Biology is the recipient of the Early Career Fellow of the Ecological Society of America. 

Congratulations go to Jamin Rader and Claire Zarakas both of whom were awarded the 2019 DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF). 

Congratulations to our student weather forecasters who won the national collegiate forecasting contest: The WxChallenge. The WxChallenge has been testing the forecast skills of university students since the fall of 2006.   

As air quality improves, the invisible chemistry happening in the air around us is changing. Skies should clear up as emissions drop, but recent results suggested that declining nitrogen oxides can create an environment where airborne carbon-containing compounds more easily convert into small particles that harm human health. 

Research led by the University of Washington proposes a new idea that may explain why some Antarctic icebergs are tinged emerald green rather than the normal blue, potentially solving a decades-long scientific mystery.