The van den Heever Group
Convective Storms
Microphysics and Aerosols
Cold Pools
INCUS
Drones
RAMS Model
tobac
Research News
Cold Pool Variability
A new paper led by Leah and Bastian Kirsch used variograms to show cold pools enhance temperature variability over that of the pre-storm boundary layer. The authors also found that numerical models underestimate this enhancement.
Deforestation and Clouds
A recently published paper led by Bee is the first to show deforestation in Southeast Asia drives a robust shift towards more widespread and shallower clouds using observational data.
Group News
2024
May 6: An update on the INCUS mission, which is led by Sue, is published in SOURCE. INCUS passed a review by NASA in November and is now in the construction phase! On top of these hardware efforts, many members of the van den Heever group are hard at work developing software for the mission.
March 1: Christine wins a second place Outstanding Student Presentation Award at the High Plains AMS/NWA Conference. Her talk titled “Cold Pool Trains in the Colorado Plains” discussed the effects of the passage of successive cold pools which do not collide (a cold pool train). Christine found that cold pool trains are highly variable, that the first cold pool in a train can stratify the environment and thus speed up the second cold pool, and that the time between passage of cold pools in a train is critical. Congratulations Christine! This is her second student presentation award!
February 29 - March 1: Christine, Rachael, and Nick all attend the High Plains AMS/NWA Conference in North Platte.
Jaunary 29 - February 2: Sue, Jennie, IT, and Charles all attend AMS in Baltimore.
2023
December 11-14: Sue, Bee, Nick, Rick, Brenda, Randy, and Steve all attend AGU in San Francisco.
December 13: Bee's research on the impact of Southeast Asian deforestation on clouds is highlighted in an EOS article.
December 4: Ben successfully (and musically) defends his master's thesis “Effects of Land Surface-Atmosphere Interactions Within Two Convective Storm Regimes”. Congratulations Ben! Ben will now be pursuing his PhD at Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany!
October 2: Bee and Nick launch a radiosonde as a demonstration for an undergraduate atmospheric science class at CSU. Thank you to the class TAs Ivy Glade and Lexi Sherman for inviting us!
