Climate Attribution: Understanding the connections between extreme weather and human-caused climate change is a developing focus of the climate science community. Using novel methods, we aim to quantify how much climate change has altered the intensity and rainfall amount of recent devastating hurricanes. 

Storyline Approaches: Investigating how the potential effects of climate change differ when planners and policymakers work together to create holistic, imaginative action plans is crucial to a sustainable future. Our group works to create narrative tools to make opaque climate change data into useful, compelling, and straightforward information that can be used in local decision making.

Stakeholder Engagement: A collaborative, imaginative planning approach to engage relevant stakeholders is important for climate change action and the co-development of science.

Tropical Cyclones: There are many hazards associated with landfalling hurricanes, such as high winds, flooding, and storm surge. By developing methods to detect and track storms, as well as their hazards, in large climate model and observational datasets, we hope to improve their forecasting and project how they may change in the future. 

Extratropical Transition: As tropical cyclones complete extratropical transition and transform into non-tropical storms, their precipitation fields shift and expand dramatically. This change in the precipitation of the storm creates inland flooding risks as the storms approach land. By analyzing the precipitation of transitioning storms, we are working to better understand the flooding risks resulting from these storms in current and future climates.

Fronts: While fronts play an important role in day-to-day weather, they can also be responsible for extreme events. Our group is refining methodologies to detect fronts and their associated precipitation in climate datasets.

Investigating Fundamentals of the Earth System: Simplified systems can help us understand the complexity of the Earth’s climate. Using idealized climate models, such as ocean-covered Earth or simplified ocean basins, we investigate fundamental aspects of the climate system such as the energy budget and transport. This approach helps to clarify the physical explanations underlying the large-scale circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, and its interaction with extreme weather such as tropical cyclones.

Understanding Extreme Weather: The destructive power of a hurricane comes from layers of warm ocean water underneath. Using a simplified climate model with a rectangular global ocean basin, more tropical cyclones develop on the western side of the basin with warmer waters, as observed in the Pacific or the Atlantic. By capturing these characteristics, the understanding of tropical cyclone-ocean interactions can potentially help us prepare for future disasters.

Exploring Changes in Storms:  Using reduced complexity climate models allows us to study tropical cyclones without many complicating factors that affect them in the real world, such as land or cooler ocean temperatures. This approach focuses on hurricanes themselves and how their high winds and rainfall react to different forcings, such as warming sea surface temperatures, to approximate how hurricanes will be impacted by climate change in the future.