Our group’s research focuses on Earth’s tropical climate. We work on a range of problems involving atmosphere-ocean dynamics, land surface processes, radiative transfer, and thermodynamics. One emphasis is monsoon circulations, which deliver water to billions of people living in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and northern Australia; monsoon winds also constitute a major component of the global circulation of Earth’s atmosphere. In our work, we combine theory, observational analyses, and numerical models, paying particular attention to the treatment of phase changes of water, as the interaction of precipitating clouds with planetary-scale flow is one of the central unresolved problems of planetary science.
Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science, 2008
MIT
M.Sc. in Geosystems, 2002
MIT
B.S. in Physics, B.A. in Math, 1997
SUNY Binghamton
Miller Postdoctoral Fellow, Ph.D. (Princeton)
Research Assistant, B.A. Applied Math (Berkeley)
Undergraduate Intern, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science major (Berkeley)
Undergraduate Intern, Physics major (Berkeley)
Undergraduate Intern, Applied Math major (Berkeley)
Postdoctoral scholar, Ph.D. (Indian Institute of Science), sponsored by India’s Monsoon Mission
James S. McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow, Ph.D. (University of Washington), now located at Coldwater Lab & Center for Hydrology in Canada
Ph.D. Candidate, M.S. Applied Math (Ecole Polytechnique)
Postdoctoral scholar, Ph.D. (Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services; INCOIS)
In Fall 2021 I will not be teaching, in order to devote my full effort to a Research Professorship with the Miller Institute.
Previous courses:
WorldMonsoons.org, a website with educational pages and recent news about monsoons
Global track datasets of monsoon disturbances:
Somali jet index, a measure of the strength of the South Asian monsoon circulation, and of roughly 30 percent of the global cross-equatorial flow
South Asian vertical shear index, the strength of the vertical shear of the zonal wind over South Asian. This was developed by Webster and Yang (1992, QJRMS) as a measure of the strength of the South Asian monsoon circulation.
Output from an idealized quasi-global aquaplanet model run without a convective parameterization (through use of the hypohydrostatic rescaling), from our paper that used this model to study the response of extreme precipitation to uniform surface warming.
Moist energy balance model, written in Python by Henry Peterson and used in Peterson and Boos (2020) to analyze the influence of radiative feedbacks and eddy diffusivity on tropical rainfall shifts.
My research group has an opening for a new graduate student to start in Fall 2022. Details can be found here.