Seminar: Wednesday, September 11, 2024

We are excited to host a special seminar by Dr. Gretchen Mullendore, the director of mesoscale and microscale meteorology lab on Wednesday, September 11 at 4 pm. Dr. Mullendore’s presentation is entitled “An Update from the NCAR MMM Lab (and Convective Cross-Tropopause Exchange!)” and will be held in Marine Sciences 261 and broadcast to Skidaway’s OSIC classroom 129

Dr. Gretchen Mullendore has served as Director of the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology (MMM) Laboratory at the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and as an NCAR Associate Director, since 2021. In these roles, she is responsible for advancing the missions of both NCAR and MMM to advance the understanding of weather and climate, to apply this knowledge to benefit society, and to promote equity and inclusion in the sciences. A significant portion of MMM’s work with the community involves developing and supporting a suite of community weather models used all around the globe, including the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) and the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model. Dr. Mullendore also serves on several boards and committees informing aspects of the weather community, including the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) Executive Committee, the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) Management Oversight Board, and the UCAR Community Programs (UCP) External Advisory Committee. Prior to joining NCAR, Dr. Mullendore was full professor and chair of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of North Dakota (UND). At UND, she conducted research for multiple sponsors, on topics ranging from chemical transport in severe storms to numerical weather prediction, and she served on over 30 graduate student committees. Dr. Mullendore is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and has received several awards for her leadership, research, and teaching including the 2017 UND Foundation/B.C. Gamble Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research and Service and the 2023 University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) Distinguished Alumna Award. Dr. Mullendore received her B.S. in Geophysics from UCSB in 1998 and her Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from University of Washington in 2003

An Update from the NCAR MMM Lab (and Convective Cross-Tropopause Exchange!)

This will be a mixed seminar, with the first half focused on high level updates on the research and model/tool development being conducted by the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology (MMM) Lab at NCAR. This will include updates on the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS), the status of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, MMM data assimilation efforts (i.e., MPAS-JEDI), and quick updates on research spanning from large eddy simulations and agent-based models of hurricanes to particle-based microphysical schemes.

The second half will focus on updates on some of my own research in convective cross-tropopause exchange. Recent studies and field campaign have shown that deep convection is a critical transport pathway, significantly altering the concentrations of water vapor and other constituents that impact the radiative balance of the lower stratosphere. But how do we best capture these impacts in simulations? To assess the quality of simulated deep convection in today’s atmosphere, we use both convective-allowing models and observations to look at the level of maximum detrainment (LMD) and overshooting tops to assess the altitudes at which mass is detrained from deep convection.