Robert A.
Houze, Jr.
Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences, University of
Washington
Laboratory Fellow of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
![]() 2017 Professional Family Tree "Storm of Influence" ![]() 2015 Olympic Mountains Field Project ![]() Pacific Northwest National Laboratory ![]() 2015 Houze Group at UW ![]() 2014 Houze receives Symons Gold Medal ![]() 2014 2nd Ed. of Cloud Dynamics Highly revised and updated ![]() 2014 Launch of GPM Satellite 2012-2014 Global Hawk flies over hurricanes ![]() 2011 S-PolKa Radar in the Maldives ![]() TRMM satellite 1997-2014 ![]() 2011 Pakistan Flood Study ![]() CloudSat satellite 2006-present ![]() 2006 Houze receives Rossby Medal
![]() Flying in the eye of Katrina 2005 |
Professor Houze received his B.S. in Meteorology from Texas A&M University in 1967. He received his Master's and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington in 1972. In 1988-89 he was Guest Professor in the Laboratory of Atmospheric Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. As of 2015, Professor Houze holds an additional appointment as a Laboratory Fellow of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington.
He
has published about 200 research articles and has
written a comprehensive book on the physics and
dynamics of all types of clouds in the atmosphere. It is
entitled
Cloud
Dynamics.
Professor
Houze has received several prestigious honors and awards.
Most
recently he was awarded the 2014 Symons
Gold Medal of the Royal Meteorological
Society, the
premier honor of that Society, and
he delivered the Symons Lecture to the Society in
2015. In
2006, he received the American Meteorological
Society's Carl-Gustaf
Rossby Research Medal, which is the
highest honor that Society can bestow on an
atmospheric scientist. In 2002, he was designated as a
“Highly Cited Researcher” by the Institute of
Scientific Information (his ISI h-index is
presently 61,
his Google Scholar h-index is 74).
In 1989
he was a co-winner (with F. Marks) of the NOAA Environmental
Research Laboratories' Distinguished Authorship
Award, and in 1982, he was
awarded both the American Meteorological Society's Clarence
Leroy Meisinger Award for his research and the
Society's
Editor's Award for his reviews of
papers for the Journal
of the Atmospheric
Sciences.
As a
result of his research, Professor Houze has been
honored as a Fellow of the American
Meteorological Society, the Royal
Meteorological Society, the
American
Geophysical Union, and the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor Houze has presented numerous special lectures such as the Bjerknes Memorial Lecture at the American Geophysical Union's 2012 Annual Meeting, was Thompson Lecturer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in 2006, and was Houghton Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. At
the UW Professor Houze teaches classes on cloud
physics and dynamics, thermodynamics,
and general
meteorology. His research interests are
mesoscale meteorology, radar meteorology, tropical
meteorology, precipitation processes, cloud dynamics,
cloud microphysics, and storm dynamics. Professor
Houze leads a research team at the UW called the Mesoscale
Group. He and his group participate in
international field projects and satellite programs
employing weather radar and aircraft in the tropics
and midlatitudes. These projects have been sponsored
by NSF, NASA, DOE, and NOAA. His approach integrates observations,
models, and theory. He has specialized in studying
convective clouds over oceans and land, tropical
cyclones, midlatitude frontal systems, and monsoons. His first major field project was in 1974, when he took part in the historic GATE project. There he collected groundbreaking data on tropical squall lines. In 1978 he led a radar experiment to study clouds in the winter monsoon over Malaysia as part of the international Monsoon Experiment (MONEX). In 1987, he investigated the convection over the ocean north of Australia with airborne radar data in the Equatorial Mesoscale Experiment (EMEX). In 1992-1993 he participated in the tropical western Pacific TOGA COARE experiment operating out of the Solomon Islands. From October 2011-January 2012, he led a radar experiment on Addu Atoll in the Maldives as part of the Dynamics of the MJO (DYNAMO) and DOE ARM MJO Experiment (AMIE). Professor Houze is currently organizing a ground validation campaign for the newly launched Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite. This project, called OLYMPEX, will take place in the Olympic Mountains of Washington State in the fall/winter of 2015-16. Professor
Houze has also worked for many years on satellite
radar observations of tropical cloud systems. Since
1985, he has served on the Science Team for the U.S.
(NASA)-Japan (NASDA) Tropical Rainfall Measuring
Mission Satellite (TRMM).
Launched in 1997, TRMM was the first satellite
to use an on-board radar, and it orbited over the
tropics until 2014, acquiring a paradigm-changing data
set on precipitating clouds in the atmosphere. He is
also on the NASA Science Teams for CloudSat
and GPM
satellites, which
are newer satellites that continue to use on-board radars to
study clouds and precipitation. Using these
radar-equipped satellites,
he and his group have studied large and small cloud
systems over all of the tropics. These studies focus
on the nature of raining cloud systems over both the
oceans and land masses of the tropics, and on how the
Himalayan and Andes mountain ranges affect the nature
of the cloud systems that occur at low
latitudes. ![]() Another area of Professor Houze's research is
understanding how mountains influence precipitating
cloud systems. In the 1970s and 80s, he studied fronts
passing over the Cascade Mountains in Washington. In
1999, he was a leader of the Mesoscale
Alpine Programme, in which he investigated
the storms that produce heavy rains and floods in the
European Alps. In 2001 he returned to the Cascades in
a project called IMPROVE
II, which studied winter storms passing over
the Oregon Cascades. He has also used satellite data
and modeling to study clouds and storms near the
Andes and Himalayas. Some of
these studies have important practical application,
especially for severe weather and floods in
mountainous regions. Professor Houze's group's paper
on floods in India and Pakistan in a 2011 was a cover
story of the Bulletin
of the American Meteorological Society. In 2015/16 he will lead the OLYMPEX
project to study fronts passing over the mountains
of the Pacific Northwest. Professor
Houze and his group at the University of
Washington have participated in several studies of the
airborne radar data collected in research flights
through hurricanes. In 2005, his Hurricane
Rainband
and Intensity Change Experiment (RAINEX)
directed flights into Hurricanes Katrina, Ophelia, and
Rita. He was interviewed by NPR and the BBC
|