NOAA Research Exprience

During the summer of 2021, I conducted research on snow droughts in the Western United States under the direction of Mimi Hughes (NOAA PSL Boulder Lab) and Nathaniel Johnson and Kai-Chih Tseng (GFDL/Princeton). Our work sought to answer explore what snow conditions we might expect in the coming century by deriving this variability from a large ensemble climate model. I am currently preparing to give a talk at AMS in January and working toward publication. Check the project out on GitHub.

Project Goals

The goal of the project is to leverage variability from the SPEAR large ensemble to explore the distribution of the onset of endemic no-snow conditions in the US West. As a model-based project, we developed a methodology to classify drought severity conditions based on historical snowfall, finding that climatological shifts are first observed early in the 21st century. We further leverage ensemble variability to highlight when regions across the west are both expected to transition to low-snow climates (based on historical snowfall) and may transition to low snow conditions, which, due to variability in atmospheric conditions could happen up to 15 years earlier. I presented my findings at AMS 2022 and am currently working toward publication – a draft paper can be found in the publication section.