Research


I am a postdoc at the University of Reading Department of Meteorology, working on the Cascade project, a part of NCAS-Climate. Cascade seeks to better understand the organization of tropical convection at many scales using the UK Met Office Unified Model (UM) at resolutions as high as 1 km and domains spanning several thousand km across. I am particularly interested in the interaction between convection and larger-scale fields, including the vertical structure of temperature and moisture at various spatial scales. A related interest is the non-linear relationship between column water vapor and precipitation and how this relationship relates to distributions of convective clusters and the temporal evolution of convective systems.

I did my Ph.D. work with David Neelin at the Department of Atmos. and Oc. Sci. at UCLA. My Ph.D. dissertation sought to determine how many vertical degrees of freedom are necessary to characterize temperature and moisture in the tropical atmosphere, especially on General Circulation Model (GCM) gridbox space and time scales and larger.  Assumptions of simple vertical structure made by the quasi-equilibrium tropical circulation model (QTCM) were tested in various observational sources.  A broader motivation was to better understand climate variability and change, both in observations and in GCM simulations.

My broader research interests include convective parameterizations, tropical cyclones, and tropical climate variability and change.

Most of my Ph.D. work is summarized in the following three articles:

Holloway, C. E. and J. D. Neelin: Temporal relations of column water vapor and tropical precipitation, submitted to J. Atmos. Sci. Aug. 2009.  Preprint (PDF)

Holloway, C. E. and J. D. Neelin, 2009: Moisture vertical structure, column water vapor, and tropical deep convection. J. Atmos. Sci., 66, 1665-1683.  Paper (AMS Page)

Holloway, C. E. and J. D. Neelin, 2007: The convective cold top and quasi equilibrium. J. Atmos. Sci., 64, 1467-1487. Preprint (PDF)

Also check out my UCLA research group's page: Climate Systems Interactions Group (CSI).

And the page for the UK consortium project I'm currently part of: Cascade

My other publications and talks can be found at: Publications.

My Ph.D. Dissertation is posted at: Dissertation




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