The new principle investigator of tropical cyclone (TC) tornadoes at SLU is
Professor Charles E.
Graves. Dr. Graves is actively supervising the dissertation work of
Dr. Rao's two former doctoral students,
Joshua W.
Scheck and
Krishnaraj
Santhanam. Recently, the last paper with Professor Rao as lead author was
submitted for publication in a special volume commemorating 40 years of
tropical meteorology work by M.P. Singh. The topic of the paper was an
overview of tornadic mesocirculations in TC Frances (1998).
In addition, a manuscript has been written and is in the final stages of
revision. This paper will be submitted to Weather and Forecasting and will
focus on the interaction of two tornadic supercells with a pre-existing
baroclinic boundary in central Florida. The two supercells were contained
within the circulation of TC Earl (1998) when they crossed the boundary
and became tornadic. For a summary of current work, please see the
presentations and papers section of this web page.
On a lighter note, the TC Tornado Group was involved in the North American Monsoon Experiment (NAME). Two groups from Saint Louis University visited Mazatlan, Mexico from 5 July through 4 August 2004. The Principle Investigator of our project was Mike Douglas of the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL). Pictures should be available for viewing shortly. We flew P3 missions over the Gulf of California and adjacent waters of the Pacific Ocean to assess the state of the atmosphere during weak, normal, and strong monsoonal flow. The ultimate result will hopefully improve model initializations in the region of southwest North America.