NASA Graduate Student Award Winners

The APAM Department is pleased to announce that three of our graduate students have received NASA Fellowships.

John Dwyer, an Applied Mathematics graduate student who works with Prof. Adam Sobel (APAM) and Prof. Michela Biasutti (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory), received a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship. 57 awards were given out of 331 applications.

Dwyer commented that, “My research is on the seasonal cycle of temperature. I’m studying how and why the seasons might change under global warming. Global climate models all expect the seasons to start a few days later and have more warming in winter than summer at high latitudes and more summer warming than winter warming at low latitudes. The projected high latitude changes are probably due to sea ice loss in the models: as sea ice melts because of global warming, the newly exposed open ocean slows and damps the surface temperature’s response to the sun. To understand this phenomenon, I’m using global climate models, observations, and simple models. I’ve been studying this problem since June 2010 under the auspices of my advisors, Adam Sobel and Michela Biasutti, who have been very supportive and helpful. We are finalizing a manuscript on this research for submission.”
 

Clara Orbe, an Applied Mathematics graduate student, won a NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Graduate Student Researchers Program fellowship. Clara is very grateful for the guidance she has received from her advisors Lorenzo Polvani (Columbia University) and Mark Holzer (Columbia University and the University of New South Wales).
 

Yutian Wu, who works with Prof. Mingfang Ting at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Prof. Mark Cane, was a recipient of the NASA Earth Science fellowship from September 2008 to August 2011. Her research topic is “Changes in the Location and Intensity of the Midlatitude Storm Tracks in a Warmer Climate.” The work includes using climate models to understand how the midlatitude storm activity is projected to change as a consequence of increased carbon dioxide and the underlying dynamical mechanisms. Yutian successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation on October 10, 2011. Her recent publications include:

(1) Wu, Yutian, Mingfang Ting, Richard Seager, Mark A. Cane and H.-P. Huang, 2011: Changes in storm tracks and energy transports in a warmer climate simulated by the GFDL CM2.1 model. Climate Dynamics, 37 (1-2), pg. 53-72.
(2) Wu, Yutian, Richard Seager, Mingfang Ting, Naomi Naik and Tiffany A. Shaw, 2011: Atmospheric Circulation Response to an Instantaneous Doubling of Carbon Dioxide Part I: Model Experiments and Transient Thermal Response in the Troposphere. J. Climate, in revision.
(3) Wu, Yutian, Richard Seager, Tiffany A. Shaw, Mingfang Ting, 2011: Atmospheric Circulation Response to an Instantaneous Doubling of Carbon Dioxide Part II: Atmospheric Transient Adjustment and its Dynamics. In preparation.