The van den Heever Group
Convective Storms
Microphysics and Aerosols
Cold Pools
INCUS
Drones
RAMS Model
tobac
Research News
Convective Environment Variability
IT led a Geophysical Research Letters paper analyzing the spatial variability of quantities such as temperature and moisture in convective environments. Near-surface variability is higher over land than over oceans, but the opposite is true for variability at 500 mb.
Cold Pools and Deforestation
Nick led a paper in Atmospheric Science Letters investigating the impacts of deforestation and cold pools on convection in the Amazon Rainforest. Deforestation creates regions devoid of rainfall, but cold pools act to reduce the size of such regions.
Haboobs on Slopes
Using a suite of high-resolution RAMS simulations, Nick led a Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres paper studying the effect of sloped terrain on haboobs. Anabatic winds can cause haboobs to propagate more quickly upslope than downslope.
Group News
2026
February 26: SOURCE publishes an article about the Testing INCUS Methods Experiment — Suborbital preLaunch Investigations of Convective Evolution (TIME–SLICE) field campaigns. TIME-SLICE serves as a key part of the calibration and validation effort for the INCUS mission. The INCUS team has tested, developed, and refined observational and strategies during TIME-SLICE. These strategies will be put to use during a post-launch calibration and validation field campaign.
February 18: Andrew wins an Outstanding Student Presentation Award for his talk titled “A Source-Layer Hypothesis to Explain Updraft Strength” at the annual American Meteorological Society (AMS) meeting in Houston, TX. Using high-resolution numerical simulations of tropical convection, Andrew and his coauthors find that updrafts do not source their air evenly throughout the boundary later. This result has many implications on better understanding the thermodynamics and intensity of storms in the tropics.
January 26 - January 29: Sue, Andrew, Peter, Steve, Nick, and Phoebe all present at the annual American Meteorological Society (AMS) meeting in Houston, TX.
January 26: Check out this awesome SOURCE article all about IT's research!
2025
December 15-19: Brenda, Jennie, IT, and Rachael all present at the annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in New Orleans, LA.
November 4-7: The 2025 INCUS Science Team Meeting takes place at CSU, featuring many of the 200 scientists and engineers involved in the mission. The team spent the week discussing INCUS science and the complex algorithms involved in INCUS capturing observations of convective mass flux in storms. The department also celebrated the INCUS mission during the science team meeting with a reception and an unveiling of an incredible painting of the INCUS spacecraft by Professor Emeritus Graeme Stephens. Read more about the INCUS Science Team Meeting here.
October 14: The van den Heever group welcomes Mathilde Ritman, a student who will be visiting the group for the next several weeks. Mathilde is a DPhil student in Philip Stier's group at the University of Oxford. Mathilde studies the properties of anvil clouds and how factors such as convective mass flux can impact these properties. The group is looking forwards to collaborating Mathilde and showing her around Fort Collins!
September 2: Sue is named the 2025 ATS Outstanding Professor of the Year! This award honors Sue's exceptional instruction in the classroom. This is Sue's fourth time being named professor of the year! Read more about this award here.
August 25: This week, group alum Aryeh Drager started as an assistant professor in SUNY Oswego's meteorology program. He is currently teaching introductory meteorology, as well as an elective in micrometeorology for meteorology majors. Aryeh is excited to be teaching and conducting research with undergraduate students, and he can't wait to see his first waterspout over Lake Ontario.