Rong Fu
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Why does extreme weather happen when it does, and what controls the giant thunderstorm systems that bring much of the world's rain? These two projects study the atmospheric processes behind heavy rain, drought, heat and fire weather.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
- Topics
mesoscale convective systems
Congo Basin
tropical rainfall
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- 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.
- Relate Congo Basin storm clusters to their surrounding thermodynamic and dynamic conditions at the weather time scale, where they behave unlike storms in other tropical regions.
- Characterize the variety of wind patterns behind warm-season extremes over the central and intermountain United States using statistical analyses, and why similar patterns sometimes fail to produce extremes.
- Determine the roles of clouds, precipitation, aerosols and land-surface feedbacks, relative to atmospheric dynamics, in intensifying dry spells, heatwaves, fire weather and floods, and in making them occur together.
More about the research
One uses a high-resolution global model to examine thunderstorm clusters over Central Africa. The other uses statistical and process-based analysis of warm-season extremes over the central and intermountain United States.
Why it matters
Congo Basin rainfall supports agriculture, river transport and livelihoods in central sub-Saharan Africa. Better understanding of its storms could improve knowledge of weather extremes and related hazards there. In the United States, heatwaves, dry spells and fire weather drive costly disasters; California's 2018 wildfires alone caused over $126 billion in losses. Clarifying their causes could inform actionable information for the public.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
A Process-Level Understanding of Mesoscale Convective Processes over the Congo Basin Using the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS)
NSF · Jul 2024 – Jun 2027
Diagnose and Understand the Mechanisms behind Warm Season Extreme Weather over Central and Intermountain United States
NSF · Jul 2022 – Jun 2027
Closest labs
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.
James Ruppert
University of Oklahoma, OK·Earth & Environmental Science
Determine whether real-world tropical Atlantic storm clusters self-organize or are forced by the large-scale environment, using SEA-POL C-band polarimetric radar aboard the R/V Meteor during PICCOLO.
Amato Evan
University of California-San Diego, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Estimate how much dust downslope windstorms and haboobs emit globally, by feeding surface winds from high-resolution 3.75 km MPAS simulations into an offline dust emission model.
The school
University of California-Los Angeles: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 803 research doctorates a year.
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