Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

People of the Chase Research Group

Dr. Tom Chase (Associate Professor)
Tom Chase is a member of the governing body of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado and Graduate School faculty serving in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering. Research interests include land surface and climate interactions, tropical climate, feedbacks in the climate system and climate modeling.

Dr. Peter Lawrence (Research Scientist)
Peter Lawrence is researching how the biosphere, land surface hydrology, and human modified landscapes interact with the climate system to impact regional and global climate. The main focus of this research is developing global land surface representations from satellite observation and historical models to use in climate models to understand the complex relationships that exist between soils, vegetation, surface hydrology, and the atmosphere. This falls in the broader research of understanding of how the land surface interacts with the rest of the climate system allowing more successfully predictions and management of the impacts of climate change and climate variability on human populations, and the agricultural and natural systems that support them.

Eungul Lee (Ph.D. student)
Eungul Lee has been working on various problems in climate science, including monsoon variability related to the coupled climate system (air-sea and air-land interactions) and atmospheric dynamics through statistical analysis using various observational datasets and climate model simulations. He is particularly interested in atmospheric circulation changes which may have resulted from recent land cover changes and interactions with other natural circulation regimes such as those due to El Nino/Southern Oscillation or monsoons. He has also been involved in developing forecast models for Asian monsoon prediction at the seasonal time scales. Because the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) has distinctly different physical mechanisms in its northern and southern component, each component of the EASM is predicted from different heat sources in the surrounding oceans. The EASM showed non-linear teleconnection patterns with the heat sources in the surrounding oceans, so he is interested in non-linear multivariate methods to enhance the predictabilities of the EASM precipitation models.

Gene Longenecker (Masters student)
Gene Longenecker is a Masters student involved in the development and testing of a Federal Emergency Management Agency flood impacts model. The National Institute of Building Sciences and FEMA are collaborating with numerous federal agencies, universities and contractors to develop a multi-hazard loss estimation model (HAZUS-MH) which assesses vulnerability to earthquakes, hurricane wind, and riverine and coastal flooding hazards. Gene's current research deals specifically with the model's physical landscape characterization for the coastal flooding module. By determining best practices to model local topography and flood inundation, Gene's research analyses historical data from Hurricane Katrina's landfall on the Mississippi Gulf Coast with an ultimate goal of validating the flood model's estimation of storm surge inundation and associated physical, social, and economic impacts. Validation of the coastal flooding model is a critical step in producing a risk-consistent hurricane model which integrates the effects of wind, storm surge, astronomical tides, and waves.

Adriana Raudzens Bailey (Masters student)
Adriana Bailey is a Masters student researching observed surface fluxes in mountainous regions.

Thomas Morse (undergraduate Research Assistant)
Thomas Morse has been an undergraduate reserch assistant for the past three years. He has been working on an anlysis of Northern Hemisphere circulation regimes and how unusual recend trends ahve been. He graduated with honors in 2006 and will be sent to Panama with the Peace Corps in the near future.