Ongoing Research Highlights

08/2023

Mullens’ research group continues to be active in the research world. Students will be presenting their research at the upcoming National Weather Association annual meeting, a regional Climate Prediction meeting in Tallahassee, and the 2024 AMS annual meeting! Check back later for more details on their work.

07/2023

Dr. Mullens and PhD Student Austin Britton participated in a 7-week scientific research experience program for high-schoolers run by UF’s Center for Precollegiate Education and Training (CPET). Two High School students worked with Mullens lab on the NSF-Funded Project to explore the changing nature of mixed-phase winter weather in a warming Climate. This included evaluation of long-term trends in freezing rain, exploring use of reanalysis data to accurately represent freezing rain, and to examine multivariate synoptic types associated with mixed-phase weather using machine learning techniques.

01/2023

Meirah Williamson (graduated MS student) published her Master’s research in the Weather and Forecasting journal of the AMS. See HERE

Dr. Esther Mullens published work with a researcher at the South Central Climate Science Center on climate projections for Transportation in Central Oklahoma. See HERE

Dr. Mullens and her students presented at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Soc. hosted in Denver CO.

Hongsheng Wang – Presented on a climatology of Atmospheric River (AR) severity over North America. You can access her poster HERE

Dr. Esther Mullens – presented two posters

  • Winter weather – looking at how climate change modifies two historical mixed-phase winter storms (HERE)
  • Precipitation ‘whiplash’ – What is it, and where does it occur (HERE).

Dr. Mullens chaired a session called ‘Winter Weather in a Warming World’ which explores how climate variability and change are contributing to episodes of winter weather and it’s extremes, and the impacts of these hazards more broadly. The same session is taking place at the 2024 Annual Meeting (see HERE).

09/2022

RaXPol in Town

The University of Oklahoma Advanced Radar Research Center (OU-ARRC)’s RaXPol Mobile radar was on site for three weeks in September. During it’s time, it conducted outreach events with the Florida museum and various Gainesville, FL schools, and was featured in Geography’s Radar and Satellite Meteorology, Weather and Forecasting, and Introductory Meteorology courses. The radar also stayed an extra week to deploy to the rainbands of Hurricane Ian near Orlando. RaXPol is a ‘community instrument’ meaning that it can use used nationwide for research and outreach.

05/2022

Aidan Burchard – Changing temperature and precipitation extremes in New England under a changing climate

Aidan’s work used a large ensemble of Global Climate Models from the IPCC CMIP5 project to examine trends and changes in the variability of heavy precipitation and high and low temperatures for the New England area. For more on his work, and what he discovered, check out his blog! (this link is to dropbox. Download the file and then open in your web browser for interactive content).

01/2022 

Hongsheng Wang – Impacts of Compound Teleconnections on Extratropical Cyclone Characteristics 

Hongsheng presented this poster at the annual Southeastern Division of the AAG in November 2021. She then presented similar content in an oral presentation at the 2022 American Met. Soc. annual meeting. Hongsheng’s work looks at how extratropical cyclones over the Pacific, North America, and Atlantic sectors are influenced in their frequency, magnitudes, and evolutions of winds and precipitation, by large-scale modes of natural climate variability. Click here to see Hongsheng’s poster.