Ogura Lecture: Professor Xubin Zeng-University of Arizona

Clouds, precipitation, and organized convection: from land surface effect to a new satellite wind mission concept 

Clouds, precipitation, and organized convection are key processes of the atmosphere. They strongly interact with dynamic, thermodynamic, and aerosol conditions in the atmosphere, and are also coupled with land and ocean surface processes in the Earth system. In this lecture, I will overview our recent efforts on these topics, including:  

• the pathway for land surface conditions (e.g., crops in Illinois) to affect local afternoon rainfall;  
• the evaluation of satellite precipitation products over coastal land versus ocean in the U.S.: does coastal land have more rainfall and extreme events than coastal ocean?  
   
• the precondition for the occurrence of organized convection over tropical ocean and land: are the precursors the same over land versus ocean or over different ocean basins? 
   
• a new satellite wind mission concept (Vientos) that combines wind lidar measurements with feature-tracking three-dimensional atmospheric wind from water vapor sounding data