I am a geographer and climatologist with research interests such as atmospheric hazards, extreme events, climate change, and applied climatology. Much of my work has focused on the following topics although it is not an exhaustive list! A full listing of publications can be found via Google Scholar.

Impacts of Weather on Transportation

My recent work has found that vehicle crash risk increases around 20% on days with winter precipitation such as snow, sleet, or freezing rain and around 10% on days with rain as compared to days that are dry. In addition, winter weather related vehicle crashes cause far more fatalities that other prominent weather hazards (at right). Current and ongoing studies are expanding these findings to better understand the impact of weather on transportation.

Above: Average number of fatalities per year due to different types of weather events, 2012-2021. Winter-related automobile and aviation from my research, other totals from NOAA.

Windstorms

Much of my research has focused on convective (thunderstorm) and nonconvective (non-thunderstorm) generated winds. I have examined the climatology of these storms, geographic patterns of fatalities and injuries due to both types of windstorm (below), lofting of bounce houses by winds, how people perceive and understand wind speeds, and public understanding of National Weather Service warnings and advisories for nonconvective wind. I have also examined the travel of tornado debris using social media data (from April 27, 2011 and other events).

Above: Location of nonconvective wind fatalities (left) and convective wind fatalities (right) in the United States.

Above: Roads closed in Baton Rouge, LA during the 2016 south-central Louisiana flood.

Hydroclimatic Variability

Research in this area has examined changes in precipitation days, hourly rainfall characteristics in the southeastern U.S., and extreme event analysis (such as the 2010 Nashville, TN floods and 2016 south-central Louisiana floods).