Blue Waters Professor
Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences
Univ. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
217-244-4250
slasher@illinois.edu

NEWS

AWARD

Professor Lasher-Trapp was awarded the American Meteorological Society’s Edward N. Lorenz Teaching Excellence Award in January 2021. This award recognized Professor Lasher-Trapp “for creating active learning and welcoming classroom environments, expanding student experiences, and advocating for women in science.” As the award recipient, Lasher-Trapp gave a keynote talk during the AMS 30th Conference on Education on January 14.

 

RECENT GRADUATE

Group member Luke Allen successfully completed his M.S. degree in July.  Luke is now pursuing a Ph.D. at North Carolina State.  We wish you well, Luke!

 

NEW GROUP MEMBER

We welcomed Sophie Orendorf, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to our group in Fall 2020.  Sophie is investigating possible changes in the severity of wind storms over the U.S. due to climate change.   She is using a “pseudo-global warming approach”, conducting high-resolution numerical modeling of past cases of severe wind storms, and then simulating them again in a warmer climate, to understand how climate change may alter their characteristics.

 

GROUP OVERVIEW

Our group uses numerical modeling with observational analysis to investigate research problems associated with the development of clouds and precipitation. Our successes in the last decade, often with other collaborators, include demonstrating when giant aerosol particles are (or are not) important in warm rain formation, how the productivity of the warm rain process may change in a future warmer climate, the importance of variability resulting from entrainment and mixing upon accelerating or preventing warm rain formation, the influence of a strong warm rain process upon ice production in oceanic cumuli, and the behavior of clouds as shedding thermals that thus entrain air through their leading edges. We have published multiple articles in peer-reviewed journals and regularly present our work at the AMS Cloud Physics Conference and the International Conference on Clouds and Precipitation.

We have also contributed to the development of tools for visualization of ground-based and airborne radar data and high-resolution numerical simulations of clouds, evaluated the performance of aircraft-mounted cloud microphysical probes, and tested microphysical parameterizations in larger-scale cloud models. Finally, we have contributed to science education through studies on improving undergraduate understanding of the nature of science, and the development and evaluation of research-based laboratories for undergraduates in atmospheric science.

 

OUR FUTURE

We continue to shift our emphasis toward microphysical processes in deep convection.  Current projects include using very high-resolution simulations on the Blue Waters supercomputer to investigate the effects of entrainment in thunderstorms and its effect upon precipitation (NSF award), aerosol effects upon convective outflows and cold pools (DOE- ASR award), and studying the possible effects of climate change on severe weather, including hail storms and wind storms (NSF award, Jeff Trapp lead PI).