Embedded Files
January–February 2026:
The first field season of the NASA NURTURE mission was a success! NURTURE is the North American Upstream Feature-Resolving and Tropopause Uncertainty Reconnaissance Experiment, and from 24 January to 19 February 2026, this NASA-supported large-scale aircraft field campaign was based in Goose Bay, Labrador, Canada. This 2026 season was a success with 19 research flights targeting tropopause polar vortices in northeastern North America. The 2026 NURTURE field catalogue is currently being populated and hosted by the Earth Observing Laboratory at NSF/NCAR.
January 2026:
Our group is beginning a project assessing the characteristics changes in the occurrence of wintertime severe convective storms as part of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Convective Storms, an NSF/Industry-University Collaborative Research Center. We welcome August Lepique to the CIRCS team and as a new graduate research assistant in our group!
Summer/Fall 2025:
We begin planning for the NASA NURTURE mission. NURTURE is the North American Upstream Feature-Resolving and Tropopause Uncertainty Reconnaissance Experiment, a NASA-funded large-scale aircraft field campaign. The aircraft will target observations near the high-latitude tropopause with a goal of advancing knowledge by observing the structure and processes near the tropopause that lead to extreme high-impact weather (HIW) events during the winter, such as severe cold air outbreaks, windstorms and hazardous seas, snow and ice storms, sea ice breakup, and extreme precipitation. These HIW events have significant socioeconomic costs and threaten national security (e.g., destabilizing supply chains and damaging infrastructure). We deploy in January-February 2026 and 2027. We welcome Andrea Suarez-Rosado to the NURTURE team and as a graduate research assistant in our group!
Visit our team's NURTURE page for info and realtime forecasts: https://confluence.aos.wisc.edu/~lopezlang/NURTURE/
May 2025:
Congratulations to Elena Fernandez on receiving the competitive NOAA’s Weather Program Office (WPO) Innovation for Next Generation Scientists – WINGS Fellowship! Her project is titled "Implementing Machine Learning to Resolve Troposphere-Stratosphere Coupling and Teleconnections in S2S Forecasts" and will facilitate her collaborations within NOAA's Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC).
Congratulations to Dr. Cameron Paquette on successfully defending his PhD! Cameron's dissertation is titled "The Response of Tropopause Phenomena to Stratospheric Variability: Rossby Wave Breaking and Tropopause Polar Vortices." Cameron has accepted a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, CA.
Congratulations to Dr. Paul Panhans on successfully defending his PhD! Paul's dissertation is titled "Stratospheric Variability and its Relationship to Cold Air Outbreaks in the United States." Paul successfully competed his PhD while working full-time as a Research Analyst at New York State's Department of Homeland Security.
April 2025:
Andrea and Elena shared their research in the Climate Variability and Extremes session of the AI Applications in Earth System and Climate Science webinar series. The webinar series is hosted by NOAA's Climate Program Office and the NOAA Center for Artificial Intelligence.
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