Atmosphere Ocean Science Colloquium

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From Rising Air to Basin-Wide Rainstorms

Speaker: Da Yang, Stanford

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Wednesday, April 22, 2026, 3:30 p.m.

Synopsis:

Atmospheric convection and clouds are among the largest sources of uncertainty in predicting future climate change and extreme weather events. Basic questions in the field include: What makes air rise to form clouds? How do individual convective clouds organize into large-scale rainfall patterns? How does convection respond to climate warming? In this talk, I will present our recent efforts toward answering these questions by integrating theory, observations, a hierarchy of numerical models, and machine learning methods. Time permitting, I will also introduce our recent work on atmospheric rivers — powerful weather systems that bring strong winds and heavy precipitation to the west coast of North America — highlighting a vapor kinetic energy diagnostic framework and the use of microseisms as a novel observational constraint.