The van den Heever Group
Convective Storms
Microphysics and Aerosols
Cold Pools
INCUS
Drones
RAMS Model
tobac
Research News
Missing Variability in Reanalysis Data
In a new Geophysical Research Letters study, Peter Marinescu et al. ask: How Much Convective Environment Subgrid Spatial Variability Is Missing Within Atmospheric Reanalysis Data Sets? Read the paper to find out!
Forest Breeze–Cold Pool Interactions
Fromer group member, Ben Ascher, had his MS work recently published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, showing that forest breezes are important for initiating convection along forest boundaries, but that cold pools can play a key role in propagating the forest breezes themselves.
Unclouding Storm/Environment Correlations
Rick Schulte led a Geophysical Research Letters study applying PCA to 25 years of observations from spaceborne radars to succiently identify the large-scale environmental variables that distinguish between storm modes.
New Developments in tobac
A new paper led by group alums Alex Sokolowsky and Sean Freeman and published in Geoscientific Model Development presents multiple new features of the tobac cloud tracking algorithm including 3D tracking, splits and mergers, and functionality for simulations with periodic boundary conditions.
Deforestation and Clouds
A recently published Geophysical Research Letters 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.
Aerosol Effects on Precipitation
Sue, together with Philip Stier, led a Nature Geoscience review paper, synthesizing the most up-to-date scientific consensus of aerosol effects on precipitation. They present an overview of the influence of aerosol on global-to-local scales via radiative and microphysical processes and identify which mechanisms remain highly uncertain.
Group News
2025
February 20: A manuscript led by Rick Schulte et al. titled "Unclouding the Correlations: A Principal Component Analysis of Convective Environments" was selected as the February Science Highlight by the AGU Precipitation Technical Committee. Congrats to Rick and his co-authors!
January 13-16: Sue, Leah, Christine, Rachael, Randy, Rick, Charles, and Bee present at the annual American Meteorological Society (AMS) meeting in New Orleans, LA.
2024
December 9-13: Steve, IT, Brenda, Jennie, Peter, and Bee present at the annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in Washington, DC.
November 13-15: The 2024 INCUS Science Team Meeting takes place in the CIRA Commons at CSU. The INCUS Mission, led by Sue, will use three satellites to measure vertical velocity in storms. Scientists from around the globe gathered to discuss topics ranging from the progress of the mission, the INCUS algorithm, variability in convective environments, controls on anvil clouds, what we will learn from INCUS, and more!
September 9: Brenda participated in the 12th European Radar Conference (ERAD) in Rome, Italy. She showcased INCUS work with a talk and highlighted SEA-POL's adventures on a poster. The conference brought together over 400 researchers on radar meteorology from across the globe, primarily from Europe and North America. It was truly a unique venue, with a giant mural behind the oral presentations and a poster hall in a Museum of Classical Art.
September 3: Bee, Nick, Christine, Rachael, and Phoebe all participate in a visit to the department by US Senator John Hickenlooper. van den Heever group members helped prepare a radiosonde which the senator launched and flew one of our drones in a demonstration. Read more about Senator Hickenlooper's visit in the Fort Collins Coloradoan.
July 15-19: Sue, Peter, Bee, and Charles attend the International Commission on Clouds and Precipitation (ICCP) conference in Jeju, South Korea!
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.