Department of Atmospheric and Climate Science

Former postdoc Dr. Luke Parsons, now at Duke University, published a new studies with recent graduate Dr. Lucas Vargas Zeppetello and Prof. David Battisti, titled “Tropical deforestation accelerates local warming and loss of safe outdoor working hours” in the journal One Earth. 

Daehyun Kim and Wei-Yi Chen’s are improving forecasts of lightning using machine learning. Their new paper and talk at AGU were highlighted by UW News. They used data from the World Wide Lightning Location Network held at UW. 

Two graduate student proposals in the University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences are among this year’s recipients of the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) award. 

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.