08/2025
Recently published work by Dr. Mullens and colleagues includes:
- Mullens and Engstrom, 2025. Drought to Flood to Drought: A Review of Definitions of Precipitation Whiplash Events, What Causes Them and Their Impacts Over the Continental United States. International J. Climatology. https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.8850
- Britton and Mullens, 2025. Temporal and Spatial Analysis of Freezing Rain Regimes over Eastern North America. J. Applied Meteorology and Climatology. https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-24-0173.1
- Klees et al., 2025. What Does a Modern Atmospheric Dynamics Course Look Like? Bulletin of the American Met. Soc. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-24-0231.1.
In recent months, Dr. Mullens welcomes two new members of her research group:
- Agatha (Oluchi) Anokwu, joined Spring 2025. PhD student. Research interest: hydroclimatic variability in West Africa.
- Hilda (Goldie) Kpeli, joined Fall 2025. PhD student.
05/2025
Undergraduate students Kara Rydberg and Anna Grace Cornell joined the Mullens lab from January-May, working on short projects related to Mullens NSF-sponsored research on freezing rain. More information on their contributions will soon be available on THIS PAGE.
01/2025
Dr. Mullens co-chaired the third annual ‘winter weather in a warming world’ session at the AMS annual meeting in New Orleans, LA, as well as presenting work on precipitation whiplash. Austin Britton presented more on his dissertation work on freezing rain in a warming climate.
07/2024
Dr. Mullens hosted two undergraduate students from Newcastle University in the UK on the inaugural Newcastle-UF exchange program through CLAS and other colleges at UF, and the department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Physics at Newcastle. Both students worked on statistical analysis of precipitation whiplash events and links with natural variability across the U.S, using historical gridded precipitation data, and various natural variability indices. They also explored the local area, including Cedar Key, and the UF wind tunnel, to learn more about meteorology as a discipline, in particular, how hurricanes impact the region and the research done at UF to understand the hazards and mitigate damage.
03/2024
Megan Borowski successfully defended her MS thesis! She is continuing in her role as broadcast meteorologist with Florida Public Radio, based at the University of Florida. Her thesis can be accessed HERE.
01/2024
The Mullens research group were very active at the American Meteorological Society annual meeting in Baltimore, MD. Austin presented his work on identifying synoptic regimes for freezing rain events in eastern North America. Megan Borowski presented work from her upcoming Master’s thesis on evaluating the performance of the High Resolution Rapid Refresh forecasts of rainfall during Florida sea breeze season. Dr. Mullens presented her work on a long-term climatology of freezing rain events and links with natural climate variability. Additionally, Dr. Mullens and colleagues presented on education research pertaining to atmospheric dynamics curriculum.
10/2023
Hongsheng Wang successfully defended her PhD dissertation! She is now a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Exeter, UK, where she is working on a multi-institution project exploring atmospheric rivers in a changing climate. Hongsheng has published the first of her research papers which can be accessed HERE
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.