New York City / Long Island Chapter of the American Meteorological Society Seminar Series
Prof. Lorenzo Polvani and Philip Orton (alumnus of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and current Research Scientist at the Stevens Institute of Technology) re-awakened the long-dormant public seminar series of the New York City / Long Island Chapter of the American Meteorological Society. One or two events will take place each semester at Columbia covering topics ranging from atmospheric science, physical oceanography, meteorology, climate, and hydrology.
The first seminar, which took place on Thursday, November 15, 2012, featured Kerry Emanuel, Professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He presented a talk on “Assessing Storm Surge Risk at New York City” to a packed auditorium.
Prof. Emanuel is member of the National Academy of Sciences, and winner of the Carl Gustaf Rossby Research Medal from the American Meteorological Society, its highest honor. He is most well-known for his work on ocean heat and tropical cyclones, and more recently on relating this to climate change.
Prof. Emanuel currently works on various aspects of moist convection in the atmosphere, and on tropical cyclones. He is interested in fundamental properties of moist convection, including the scaling of convective velocities and the nature of the diurnal cycle of convection over land. His group has developed a promising technique for inferring tropical cyclone activity from coarse-grain output of climate models or re-analyses.
The second seminar, which took place on January 31, 2013, featured James Doyle, the Head, Mesoscale Modeling Section, Naval Research Laboratory, who spoke on the “Predictability of Tropical Cyclones – Perspectives from Sandy and Irene.”
James Doyle is the head of the Mesoscale Modeling Section of the Marine Meteorology Division of the Naval Research Laboratory, and a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). He has been recognized for his contributions to the science of mountain meteorology and mesoscale predictability, significant scientific advancement in our understanding of terrain-induced gravity waves, micro-structure of leeside rotors, numerical methods, and adjoint-based mesoscale predictability. He has served in leadership roles in several field projects, and is an accomplished modeler as the chief scientist for the Navy’s Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS), as well as its tropical cyclone version (COAMPS-TC) that has been one of the best-performing hurricane intensity forecast models over the last several seasons, including particularly accurate forecasts for Irene and Sandy.