James Ruppert
University of Oklahoma, OK·Earth & Environmental Science
Tropical thunderstorms rarely occur alone. They often clump into clusters, squall lines and larger storm systems, and some of these grow into hurricanes.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
- Topics
tropical meteorology
atmospheric science
convective organization
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- 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.
- Measure how organized convective clusters across the Intertropical Convergence Zone affect their surrounding environment by combining ship radar, weather balloons, cloud radar, lidar, radiometer and aircraft data.
- Test whether cloud-radiative forcing in stratiform rain and anvil clouds accelerates tropical cyclone formation, using convection-permitting model experiments that remove or switch on cloud-radiation effects.
- Quantify how buoyancy, vertical motion and moist entropy respond to cloud-radiative forcing in shallow, deep and stratiform convection, and assess sensitivity to model framework, physics and grid resolution.
More about the research
This clumping, called convective organization, shapes extreme rainfall, storm formation and how Earth balances incoming and outgoing energy. A central question is whether storms organize themselves through their own internal processes or are pushed together by the surrounding winds and ocean temperatures. The work combines an ocean field campaign with computer simulations to study how clouds and storms organize and how they interact with sunlight and heat radiation.
Why it matters
Tropical cyclones are the leading cause of weather-related deaths and property losses in the U.S., and organized storms produce nearly half of all tropical rainfall. Better understanding of how storms cluster and how clouds and radiation speed up hurricane formation could improve forecasts. This would help coastal communities prepare for extreme rain and storms, and could refine estimates of how storm organization affects global warming.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yunji Zhang
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure how cloud-radiation forcing changes buoyancy, vertical motion and moist entropy in shallow convection, deep convection and stratiform rain, using convection-permitting numerical model experiments.
Andrea Jenney
Oregon State University, OR·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether the net cooling cloud radiative effect over oceanic ITCZs comes partly from differences in energy carried away by ocean circulation between stormy and calm regions, using reanalyses and CESM2 slab-ocean simulations.
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.
The school
University of Oklahoma: 11 labs on PI Pages, $474M a year on research, 225 research doctorates a year.
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