Angel Adames-Corraliza
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Rain in the tropics is not random. Huge regions of cloud and storm organize themselves and travel across the globe, and these systems steer weather far beyond the tropics — including hurricane chances in the Gulf of Mexico and the atmospheric rivers that soak California.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
Madden-Julian Oscillation
Quasi-Biennial Oscillation
tropical convection
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Test whether colder lower-stratospheric temperatures during the easterly QBO phase strengthen the MJO by promoting cirrus clouds and their infrared radiative feedback, using COSMIC, CALIPSO and MLS satellite data plus reanalyses.
- Evaluate the cirrus hypothesis against climate model simulations and a simple linear model, including why the observed QBO-MJO relationship is absent in records before 1980.
- Develop observational criteria that identify moisture modes, tropical disturbances whose evolution is governed by free-tropospheric water vapor, and compare their budget equations with linear theory.
- Diagnose moisture-vortex instability, in which horizontal moist static energy transport feeds tropical depression-like disturbances, and use the resulting criteria to assess how general circulation models represent these systems.
- Characterize how the precipitation-buoyancy relationship between rainfall and entraining plume buoyancy varies across spatial scales and through the life cycle of mesoscale convective systems.
- Determine how dynamical factors such as entrainment, wind shear, vorticity and cold pools modify thermodynamic controls on deep convection, using radar records, field campaign data, satellite observations and convective tracking databases.
More about the research
Yet the physics that makes these systems grow, move and die is still not pinned down, and weather and climate models reproduce them poorly. Work in this group centers on one idea: that water vapor, clouds and the way they trap and release radiation are not side effects of tropical weather but active drivers of it. Separate projects attack this from theory, observations and model evaluation.
Why it matters
Tropical weather systems like the MJO are the main source of predictability for weather two to six weeks ahead, a window that matters for hurricane outlooks, flood and drought warnings, and water management. Better theory and sharper tests of convection in climate models could improve subseasonal forecasts and reduce a long-standing source of error in climate projections. The Spanish-language podcast and workshops described in one grant address a shortage of geoscience learning materials in a widely spoken language.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
CAREER: Understanding How Moist Processes Shape Tropical Motions in Observations and General Circulation Models
NSF · Jan 2023 – Dec 2027
Collaborative Research: Characterizing interactions between tropical deep convection and the environment using a buoyancy framework
NSF · Sep 2022 – Aug 2027
Collaborative Research: Cloud-Radiative Feedback as the Coupling Mechanism of the Madden-Julian Oscillation and Quasi-Biennial Oscillation
NSF · Jul 2023 – Jun 2027
Closest labs
Charlotte Demott
Colorado State University-Fort Collins, CO·Earth & Environmental Science
Test how rain-formed cold lids on the ocean delay and then intensify tropical storms and the Madden-Julian Oscillation, by comparing regional atmosphere-ocean simulations with the lid active or disabled.
Da Yang
University of California-Davis, CA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Test whether vapor buoyancy, the lift that moist air gets from water vapor's light molecular mass, warms the dry regions of the tropical atmosphere, using satellite observations and numerical simulations.
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.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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