Dr. William A. Gallus, Jr. has been a professor of meteorology at Iowa State University since 1995. His research has focused on improved weather forecasting, especially of convective systems and severe weather, and he has authored over 60 refereed publications. He headed a project to create a virtual reality tornadic thunderstorm and has also been part of a team that developed the first tornado simulator in the world capable of creating a translating tornado large enough for engineering studies. This simulator has been featured on roughly a dozen national media outlets. He currently serves as chief editor of the AMS journal Weather and Forecasting.
Dr. Adam Houston joined the UNL faculty as an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences in 2006. Prior to this he served as a visiting instructor at UNL and visiting assistant professor and postdoctoral research assistant in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Purdue University. Dr. Houston received his Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his B.S. in meteorology from Texas A&M University. Dr. Houston’s research addresses fundamental mechanisms and environmental controls that regulate deep convection (deep tropospheric air transport manifested as cumulonimbus clouds). He is principally concerned with the initiation of deep convection and the impact of airmass boundaries (demarcations between large bodies of air that are roughly homogeneous in their horizontal extent) on deep convection morphology, propagation, rotation, longevity, and strength. His current projects include the development of unmanned aircraft systems for sampling the environment near supercells (rotating, sometimes tornadic thunderstorms) as part of the second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX-2). He is also testing a new theory for understanding and forecasting thunderstorm initiation, investigating the role played by airmass boundaries on storm organization, propagation, and rotation, and reassessing the environmental parameters used to forecast supercells. Dr. Houston’s Severe Storms Research Group (SSRG) consists of 3 M.S. students, 1 PhD student, and an undergraduate student all pursuing research related to the common themes of thunderstorm-boundary interactions and thunderstorm climatologies. Dr. Houston’s teaching interests include dynamic meteorology (the physics of atmospheric motion), radar meteorology, and the dynamics of severe thunderstorms.
Jonathan Racy has been a forecaster with the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) in Norman, OK since 1998. Prior duty stations include the Weather Service Office in Fort Wayne, IN and the Weather Forecast Office in La Crosse, WI. Jon has co-authored papers spanning many facets of severe weather forecasting and is currently conducting research on convective initiation, mode and evolution. Jon is also heavily involved in COMET-related projects related to the North American monsoon and serves as the winter-weather, heavy rainfall and aviation program leaders at SPC. He also serves as a Penn State University consulting meteorologist for the online Meteorology 361 course: Fundamentals of Mesoscale Weather Forecasting.
Last Update: Monday, March 15, 2010