Department of Atmospheric and Climate Science

A recent UW News article written by Atmospheric Sciences alumni Hannah Hickey “Planting trees in pastureland provides significant cooling in the tropics” highlights the current research of Professor David Battisti and first author graduate student Lucas Vargas Zeppetello. 

Professor Lynn McMurdie’s hopes came true this week with multiple snow storms hitting the eastern U.S., where a team from our department was ready to fly through them with the NASA P-3 aircraft. 

Becky Alexander’s group is participating in the Alaskan Pollution And Chemical Analysis (ALPACA) field campaign in Fairbanks, AK in January – February 2022. The city of Fairbanks, AK regularly exceeds the EPA air quality standard for particulate matter during winter. 

The Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington invites applications for a full-time position as Research Associate Professor. The successful candidate will be expected to engage in research that focuses on cloud modeling and cloud-climate feedbacks, and nominally includes the use of water isotopologues in the study of the global atmospheric circulation. 

Dale Durran talks about his lates work to use machine learning to make weather forecasts with a reporter on the College of the Environment’s news page. Learn how AI speeds up the forecast process and has the potential to improve forecast accuracy. 

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.