It's no fluke that Matt Kelsch is a meteorologist. He was so interested in weather as a child that his fourth grade teacher actually wrote him special tests on the subject.
As a graduate student in physics, Maura Hagan found herself frustrated and on the verge of dropping out. "I wanted to quit but the chair of the physics department would not allow me to," she recalls. "He was a profound mentor. He said, 'You may take a leave of absence, but you come back to me in one year.'"
Talea Mayo is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin and has been working on increasing the accuracy of computer models by incorporating data into hurricane forecasts.
Tim Brown has been interested in stars ever since he was a child reading about the launch of Sputnik and other satellites in the 1950s.
Tim Scheitlin grew up in southeast Iowa, where gigantic thunderstorms unfold across the open landscape. "I would sit in front of the picture window facing west, watching these storms roll through. My mom and dad were always telling me to get away from that window," he recalls.
One morning, six-year-old Ying-Hwa Kuo woke on his family's rice farm in Tai Chung, in west-central Taiwan, to a world transformed. A typhoon—the name for hurricanes in the Northwest Pacific—had brought intense rain and flooding.
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Take a journey through Earth science with a visit to the traveling exhibition.
At the National Center for Atmospheric Research, we don't forecast the weather. We get inside the weather, climate, and surrounding environment to understand it better.
Resource Type: Videos
A blizzard isn’t just any old snowstorm. It’s extreme winter weather. Watch and learn what makes these storms special.
Resource Type: Videos