Happenings

Aug. 2025   I wrote an article for The Conversation entitled "5 forecasts early climate models got right - the evidence is
all around you"   [article]

June 2025   I spent a week in Nebraska performing climate science outreach with Climate Up Close.  
[Itinerary] [news coverage] [YouTube]

June 2025   I was interviewed by a local Princeton paper for an articleabout GFDL and the recent Weather and Climate Livestream, at which I also interviewed and moderated a presentation from GFDL scientist Isaac Held.   [YouTube]

June 2025   I spoke about "The Climate Sensitivity Hierarchy and the Utility of TCR" at the ongoing virtual ECS Symposium.   [video]

May 2025   The paper "A Holistic View of Climate Sensitivity", co-authored with several other GFDL scientists, is now published in Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences.   [article webpage] [pdf]

May 2025   The paper "The Land-Ocean Contrast in Deep Convective Intensity in a Global Storm-Resolving Model", led by former GFDL post-doc Tristan Abbott, is now published in JAMES.   [article webpage] [pdf] [animation]

May 2025   The paper "Droplet Nucleation In a Rapid Expansion Aerosol Chamber", part of a broad collaboration with the Deike and Weichman labs at Princeton U, is now published in RSI.   [article webpage] [pdf]

April 2025   The paper "A robust constraint on the response of convective mass fluxes to warming", led by post-doc Andrew Williams, is now published in JAMES.   [article webpage] [pdf]

April 2025   The paper "Water Vapor Spectroscopy and Thermodynamics Constrain Earth's Tropopause Temperature", led by Brett McKim and co-authored with Geoff Vallis and Neil Lewis, is now published in AGU Advances.   [article webpage] [pdf]

Feb. 2025   I spoke at the Math Climate Research Network (MCRN) virtual colloquium about "New insights into CO2 radiative forcing".   [YouTube]

Jan. 2025   I was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) by the Biden administration.   [WH announcement]

Nov. 2024   The paper "A Refined Zero-Buoyancy Plume Model for Large-Scale Atmospheric Profiles and Anvil Clouds in Radiative-Convective Equilibrium", led by Zeyuan Hu and co-authored with Zhiming Kuang, is now published in JAMES.  
[article webpage] [pdf]

Sep. 2024   I was awarded the Henry G. Houghton Award by the American Meteorological Society for "providing robust and comprehensive theoretical frameworks to illuminate complex phenomena in climate physics".
[AMS announcement] [GFDL announcement]

Aug. 2024   I was interviewed for an article in Quantaabout the quantum-mechanical foundation of CO2 forcing.  

Aug. 2024   I spent a week in New Hampshire performing climate science outreach with Climate Up Close.   [Itinerary] [NPR]

Dec. 2023   The paper "State dependence of CO2 forcing and its implications for climate sensitivity", led by Haozhe He and co-authored with Brian Soden and Ryan Kramer, is now published in Science.   [article webpage] [pdf] [Physics World]

Sep. 2023   The paper "What controls the entrainment rate of dry buoyant thermals with varying initial aspect ratio?", led by Hugh Morrison and co-authored with Daniel Lecoanet and John Peters, is now published in JAS.   [article webpage]

Sep. 2023   The pedagogical paper "Climate sensitivity from radiative-convective equilibrium: A chalkboard approach" is now published in the American Journal of Physics. [article webpage] [pdf]

Sep. 2023   I wrote a book review of Steve Koonin's Unsettled for the American Journal of Physics. [article webpage] [pdf]

Aug. 2023   I wrote an op-ed for APS News entitled "Is Climate Science Physics?" [article]

May 2023   The paper "An Analytic Model for the Clear-Sky Longwave Feedback", led by Daniel Koll and co-authored with Nick Lutsko, is now published in JAS.   [article webpage] [pdf]

Mar. 2023   The paper "Circus tents, convective thresholds, and the non-linear climate response to tropical SSTs", led by PhD student Andrew Williams and co-authored with Jonah Bloch-Johnson, is now published in JAMES.   [article webpage] [pdf] [Editor's highlight]

Oct. 2022   The paper "Three rules for the decrease of tropical convection with global warming" is now published in JAMES.   [article webpage] [pdf]

Sep. 2022   The paper "Manabe's Radiative-Convective Equilibrium", co-authored with Isaac Held and V. Ramaswamy, is now published in BAMS.   [article webpage] [pdf]

Aug. 2022   The paper "Dynamic pressure drag on rising buoyant thermals in a neutrally stable environment", led by Hugh Morrison and co-authored with Jun-ichi Yano, is now published in JAS.   [article webpage] [pdf]

Mar. 2022   I wrote a piece for the online magazine Inference on the relation between climate science and physics. [article]

Jan. 2022   The paper "On the resolution-dependence of anvil cloud fraction and precipitation efficiency in radiative-convective equilibrium", co-authored with Linjiong Zhou, is now published in JAMES.   [article webpage] [pdf] [si]

Jan. 2022   I spent a weekend in the Florida panhandle performing climate science outreach with Climate Up Close.
[news coverage]

December 2021   The paper "The Connection between Carnot and CAPE Formulations of TC Potential Intensity", led by Raphael Rousseau-Rizzi and co-authored by myself and Tim Merlis, is now published in Journal of Climate.   [article webpage] [pdf]

Nov. 2021   I spoke about "Robustness of the longwave clear-sky feedback: From pencil-and-paper to coupled GCMs" at the ongoing virtual ECS Symposium.   [video]

September 2021   The paper "An Analytical Model for Spatially Varying Clear-Sky CO₂ Forcing", co-authored by Jake Seeley, David Paynter, and Stephan Fueglistaler, is now published in Journal of Climate.
[article webpage] [pdf] [APS-GPC newsletter]

August 2021   The paper "Joint Dependence of Longwave Feedback on Surface Temperature and Relative Humidity", led by PhD student Brett McKim and co-advised by myself and Geoff Vallis, is now published in Geophysical Research Letters.
[article webpage] [pdf]

July 2021   The paper "Simpson's law and the Spectral Cancellation of Climate Feedbacks", co-authored with Daniel Koll and Nick Lutsko, is now published in Geophysical Research Letters.   [article webpage] [pdf]

June 2021   I wrote a reviewof Steve Koonin's book Unsettled for C-Change Conversations.

June 2021   The perspective piece "Accelerating progress in climate science", co-authored with Tapio Schneider and Rob Socolow, is now published in Physics Today.   [article webpage] [pdf]

Apr. 2021   I was interviewed by friend and colleague Adam Sobel for the Deep Convection podcast.

Mar. 2021   Princeton sophomore Grace Liu's research on the historical record of Lake Carnegie freeze-over, supervised by Gabe Vecchi, myself, and Sirisha Kalidindi, was featured on the Princeton university homepage.   [PU article] [PAW article] [preprint]

Dec. 2020   The paper "H₂O windows and CO₂ radiator fins: a clear-sky explanation for the peak in ECS", led by collaborator Jake Seeley, is now published in Geophysical Research Letters.   [article webpage] [pdf] [talk]

Oct. 2020   I gave a presentation entitled "How high the sky? Tropospheric depth and water vapor spectroscopy" at the ongoing virtual ECS Symposium.

Aug. 2020   The paper "Linearity of outgoing longwave radiation: From an atmospheric column to global climate models", led by PhD student Yi Zhang and co-authored by myself and Stephan Fueglistaler, is now published in Geophysical Research Letters.   [article webpage] [pdf]

Apr. 2020   I received the 2019 James R. Holton award for early career scientists from the American Geophysical Union. [citation]

Jan. 2020   Two papers on radiative transfer, "Simple Spectral Models for Atmospheric Radiative Cooling," and "On the Cooling-to-Space Approximation", led by myself and in collaboration with Stephan Fueglistaler, are now published in JAS.
[article webpage] [pdf] [corrigendum] [article webpage] [pdf] [corrigendum]

Jan. 2020   I was interviewed for another story about climate scientists flying less, this one on Philadelphia public radio WHYY. Other content on this topic can be found in the May 2019 post below.

Dec. 2019   Two papers on entrainment in dry convection, "Entrainment in Resolved, Dry Thermals" and "Buoyancy-driven Entrainment in Dry Thermals", led by my collaborator Daniel Lecoanet and student Brett McKim respectively, are now published.   [article webpage] [pdf] [article webpage] [pdf] [animations]

Nov. 2019   The paper "Climatology explains intermodel spread in tropical upper tropospheric cloud and relative humidity response to greenhouse warming", led by Stephen Po-Chedley and co-authored by myself and others, is now published in Geophysical Research Letters.   [article webpage] [pdf]

Aug. 2019   I was interviewed, along with many others, for a story in The Chronicle of Higher Education about climate science and skepticism here in Princeton. [pdf]

Aug. 2019   I spent a week in central Pennsylvania performing climate science outreach with Climate Up Close.   [TV coverage] [Podcast]

Aug. 2019   Xin Rong Chua, working with her PhD advisor Yi Ming and myself, published a paper entitled "Investigating the Fast Response of Precipitation Intensity and Boundary Layer Temperature to Atmospheric Heating Using a Cloud-Resolving Model" in Geophysical Research Letters.   [article webpage] [pdf] [si]

May 2019   I was interviewed, along with Kim Cobb and Peter Kalmus, for a story in Science about climate scientists flying less. I discuss my own experience in further detail at noflyclimatesci.org.

April 2019   I discussed climate science at Rob Socolow's retirement symposium (w/Isaac Held and Tapio Schneider).   [slides] [video (excerpt)] [video (full)] [press]

Mar. 2019   I presented on "Climate science: how do we know what we know?" at Bronx Community College in New York City, organized by Professor Monika sikand.

Feb. 2019   A second paper on anvil clouds, entitled "FAT or FiTT: Are anvil clouds or the tropopause temperature-invariant?", led by colleague Jacob T. Seeley, also now published in Geophysical Research Letters.   [article webpage] [pdf] [si]

Jan. 2019   I spoke at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory as well as Princeton University on "simple models of the H2O and CO2 greenhouse effects".   [slides] [video]

Jan. 2019   Our work entitled "Formation of tropical anvil clouds by slow evaporation", led by colleague Jacob T. Seeley, now published in Geophysical Research Letters.   [article webpage] [pdf] [si]

Dec. 2018   I presented on "Climate science: how do we know what we know?" at Hunter College in New York City, organized by Professor Randye Rutberg.

Oct. 2018   My work entitled "Mean precipitation change from a deepening troposphere", done in collaboration with David Romps, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.   [article webpage] [pdf] [si]