Christopher E. Holloway

Biography

I am a Lecturer in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading. I study atmospheric convection, tropical weather and tropical climate. I am particularly interested in the interaction between convection and larger-scale fields and the organization of convection, including the vertical structure of temperature and moisture at various spatial scales. A related interest is the non-linear relationship between column water vapour and precipitation and how this relationship relates to distributions of convective clusters and the temporal evolution of convective systems. I'm also involved in efforts to improve the way current global weather and climate models represent convection. I was an independent NERC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in NCAS-Climate at the University of Reading Department of Meteorology from May 2012-April 2015. My fellowship project, titled "The Organization of Tropical Rainfall," sought to identify the processes that lead to convective self-aggregation (spontaneous clustering) in idealized high-resolution model simulations and to explore the extent to which they are important for convective organization in the real world. This has implications for phenomena including the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) and tropical cyclones, which are among my broader research interests. I was a postdoc at the University of Reading Department of Meteorology from July 2008-May 2012, working with Steve Woolnough on the Cascade project, a part of NCAS-Climate. Cascade aimed to better understand the organization of tropical convection at many scales using the UK Met Office Unified Model (UM) at resolutions as high as 1.5 km and domains spanning several thousand km across. The main focus of my work has been to study the differences between explicit and parameterized convection for simulations of the same case studies. Our work investigating the improved distribution of precipitation in the expicit convection runs I did my Ph.D. work with David Neelin at the Department of Atmos. and Oc. Sci. at UCLA. My Ph.D. dissertation sought to determine how many vertical degrees of freedom are necessary to characterize temperature and moisture in the tropical atmosphere, especially on General Circulation Model (GCM) gridbox space and time scales and larger. Assumptions of simple vertical structure made by the quasi-equilibrium tropical circulation model (QTCM) were tested in various observational sources. A broader motivation was to better understand climate variability and change, both in observations and in GCM simulations.

Research Interest

study the differences between explicit and parameterized convection for simulations of the same case studies