Justin Minder
University at Albany, NY·Earth & Environmental Science
Mountains strongly shape the weather around them. They store snow that supplies water, and they trigger hazards such as sudden downpours, blizzards and rapid temperature swings.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
- Topics
mountain meteorology
Andes
South America
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Identify the mechanisms that govern changing temperature and precipitation patterns over the Andes by testing several hypotheses within a single set of high-resolution South American weather simulations.
- Quantify and constrain uncertainty in Andes climate projections arising from model resolution and large-scale atmospheric dynamics, using sensitivity experiments, statistical models and observational constraints.
- Train a generative AI model on high-resolution simulations to downscale a larger ensemble of global climate simulations over South America, turning coarse output into local detail, and share the projections.
- Determine how mesoscale air motions and microscale particle processes shape near-freezing precipitation type, using WINTRE-MIX aircraft, mobile radar and surface observations from Quebec, New York and Vermont.
- Assess how processes at multiple scales combine to set the predictability of winter precipitation type, such as freezing rain versus snow, using field observations, analysis and modeling.
More about the research
Small temperature differences near freezing also decide whether a storm brings snow, ice or rain. These projects study how landscape and atmospheric processes at different scales control precipitation and temperature. One project uses high-resolution climate modeling over the Andes. The other is a field campaign on winter storms in northeastern North America.
Why it matters
Freezing rain and mixed winter precipitation disrupt aviation, roads and power distribution across the U.S. and Canada. Better understanding of how precipitation type is set could improve forecasts of these events. Mountain snowpack is a key water supply for the western U.S. Clearer mechanisms and AI-downscaled climate projections for the Andes could help water managers and communities in mountain regions plan for changing temperature and precipitation.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Lynn McMurdie
University of Washington, WA·Earth & Environmental Science
Determine how large-scale weather patterns and water vapor transport shape the character of snowfall events over Colorado's Park Range, using a winter-long radar and balloon dataset combined with numerical modeling.
Zhanqing Li
University of Maryland, MD·Earth & Environmental Science
Determine how cloud-surface coupling, the link between clouds and the lowest atmospheric layer, changes the influence of aerosols on clouds over urban, forested and coastal land surfaces.
Rong Fu
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Simulate mesoscale convective systems over the Congo Basin with the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS), a global cloud-resolving model, to explain how these storm clusters start, develop and travel.
The school
University at Albany: 15 labs on PI Pages, $472M a year on research, 144 research doctorates a year.
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