Severe Convective Storms and Tornadoes―Observations and Dynamics

This book is a focused, comprehensive reference on recent research on severe convective storms and tornadoes. It will contain many illustrations of severe storm phenomena from mobile Doppler radars, operational Doppler radars, photographs and numerical simulations.

I have been funded by the National Science Foundation continuously since 1977 to study various aspects of severe convective storms and tornadoes. My research group pioneered the use of instruments to study tornadoes close up from a ground-based mobile platform. In particular, for the past twenty years we have been using increasingly sophisticated mobile Doppler radars mounted on vans and trucks to determine the fine-scale structure of tornadoes and to document their formation. To a lesser extent, I have also used numerical models to study the behavior of severe convective storms using controlled numerical simulations. I have single-authored the trade book TORNADO ALLEY: MONSTER STORMS OF THE GREAT PLAINS (Oxford Univ. Press) and a two-volume textbook SYNOPTIC-DYNAMIC METEOROLOGY IN MIDLATITUDES (Oxford Univ. Press). I wrote these books while here at the University of Oklahoma and while on various sabbaticals and other leaves at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO. I have also authored or co-authored 89 refereed journal articles and seven chapters in books or monographs in addition to ten contributions to encyclopedias and other books; the subject of a majority of these publications is in the area of severe convective storms. A colleague of mine and I have just edited a monograph, to be published by the American Meteorological Society, honoring the career of our late graduate advisor, Fred Sanders, an expert in synoptic and mesoscale meteorology. I have been teaching a graduate-level course on convective storms approximately every other year for approximately 25 years and have made many invited presentations on this topic at scientific meetings and at other institutions