DOE Renews Funding for Kleiss Research

Jessica Kleiss, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, and  her team of collaborators from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) applied for and received $250K in renewed competitive funding from the Department of Energy that will support their research for an additional year.  Dr. Kleiss is the Principal Investigator on the collaborative project entitled “Macro-physical Properties of Shallow Cumulus from Integrated ARM Observations”. Supported by the Atmospheric System Research Program, this continuing project will allow the team to apply a new data set—an 18-year record of shallow cumulous cloud macro-physical properties at a site in Oklahoma—to explore relationships between cumulus cloud properties and environmental conditions. With the support of postdoctoral researcher Erin Riley and Lewis & Clark undergraduate researchers Kat Barton and Iris Arnold, and current funding from both the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust and the Department of Energy, the team has collected and analyzed cloud data for more than the past two years. This work has resulted in publications in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology and Atmosphere and two SPIE Remote Sensing conference proceedings. Information about the larger project and its development was published in the Fall 2016 Chronicle Magazine.