Working with Professor Susan van den Heever and graduate student Matt Igel,
Aryeh Drager studied deep convection over the tropical oceans. Aryeh attends
Dartmouth College majoring in Engineering Physics with a minor in Applied
Mathematics where he was a senior.
Aryeh used use observations from the CloudSat 94-GHz cloud-profiling radar and
collocated ECMWF reanalyses from June 2006 to April 2011 to investigate the
morphology of deep-convective clouds over tropical oceans. He wanted to know
what deep-convective clouds look like over tropical oceans and
the range of spatial scales across which deep convection occurs. He studied
how convective core morphology interacts with anvil morphology and
what relationship, if any, exists between convective core attributes and anvil
attributes. Finally, he wanted to find out how
sea-surface temperature affects cloud morphology as well as
other quantities such as cloud-top temperature and anvil optical depth.
He found that a cloud object-based approach yields valuable insights into the
structure of deep-convective clouds over tropical oceans. For clouds with base
widths above 10 km, he observed a robust scaling relationship: Anvil Width
is inversely proporational to (Base Width)^2/3.
They also observed significant changes in cloud morphology with changes in
sea-surface temperature. As sea-surface temperature increases, so does
convective vigor: cores and anvils become narrower, and the transition from
base to anvil occurs at a higher height. They also noted that a significant
decrease in cloud-top temperature and a non-trivial decrease in anvil optical
depth with increasing sea-surface temperature.
Aryeh's summer research poster,
CloudSat-derived Morphology of Deep Convection over Tropical Oceans,
is available here.
Hailing from West Hartford, CT, Aryeh is interested in mesoscale meteorology,
cloud dynamics, and numerical modeling of the atmosphere. When he is not
involved in his studies, Aryeh enjoys tutoring, drawing, singing and storm
tracking during hurricane season.
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