The van den Heever Group
Convective Storms
Microphysics and Aerosols
Cold Pools
INCUS
Drones
RAMS Model
tobac
Research News
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
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.
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!
