About Me

I came to UNC Asheville in 2007 after receiving a Ph.D. in meteorology from the University of Oklahoma, specializing in land surface modeling. I also participated in a number of field projects studying topics from severe weather to precipitation measurements. I met my wife, Elaine, in graduate school and we have a beautiful daughter. Visit Kathleen's Web site for updates and photos.

Teaching

Please visit my Spring 2010 Advising Schedule to schedule an advising appointment.

I love to teach people about the wonders of our atmosphere and I care deeply about my students' academic and personal successes. I teach a number of courses at UNC Asheville on topics related to severe weather, computing techniques, atmospheric physics, instrumentation, and social impacts of weather. In Spring 2010, I will introduce FORTRAN for Meteorologists. You will find course documents using the links in the menu above. If you have questions about your course or advising, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Research

My most recent research assesses the value of assimilating observations of soil temperature, soil moisture, and satellite-derived vegetation indexes in a land surface model. Results show that the accuracy of surface energy fluxes deteriorates in the Noah land surface model with a more accurate specification of the initial land surface conditions. Using a wealth of unique surface observations, I devised an empirical latent heat flux scheme that improves short-term mesoscale forecasts. One undergraduate research student is working with me to test this new scheme during a very moist warm season in the Great Plains.

Other Items

Consider becoming a volunteer observer for CoCoRaHS and work with others to measure precipitation across the nation. I am the CoCoRaHS coordinator for Buncombe and Henderson counties in North Carolina.

The UNCA Department of Atmospheric Sciences hosts a new NCEP Reanalysis plotter. Please visit the new plotter to visualize the data.

The Department of Atmospheric Sciences will soon receive a suite of research-quality instrumentation! Stay tuned for updates.