GESTAR II Seminar Series, August 11 at 11:00am

Join us for a virtual seminar by Dr. David Stensrud, Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science, The Pennsylvania State University. His talk is titled "Using WSR-88D Radar Observations to Observe and Understand the Convective Boundary Layer."

Date and Time: Thursday, August 11, 2022 at 11:00am

Join us via Teams.

While the National Weather Service's network of WSR-88D radars were primarily developed and deployed to observe precipitating systems and their hazards, and to estimate rainfall amounts, the radars also can detect scatterers in the convective boundary layer.  These radars were further enhanced with an upgrade to dual-polarization in 2013. Using operational WSR-88D data sets over the past 5 years, faculty and students at Penn State have used radar observations to develop a 10-year climatology of horizontal convective rolls and cellular convection over central Oklahoma, including the identification of wide rolls over land, and to develop a method to estimate convective boundary layer depth using differential reflectivity observations.  Results from these studies and our current research projects will be summarized to highlight the capability of these radars to study the convective boundary layer.

David J. Stensrud is Professor and Head of the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at The Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Stensrud's research has focused on short-range ensemble forecasting and data assimilation, severe weather, convective-scale predictability, the North American monsoon, and radar observations of the convective boundary layer. For 27 years prior to his transition to Penn State, Dr. Stensrud was a Research Meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. He received his B.S. in Mathematics and Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Meteorology from The Pennsylvania State University. He is a recipient of the White House Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the American Meteorological Society's Clarence Leroy Meisinger and Charles Franklin Brooks awards, the NOAA Distinguished Career Award, and is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. Dr. Stensrud has authored over 150 formal peer-reviewed publications and the book Parameterization Schemes: Keys to Understanding Numerical Weather Prediction Models.

For more information on the GESTAR II Seminar Series, click here.