On August 29, 2005, Deanna Hence was aboard a research airplane flying through Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane heading for New Orleans. Thinking back to that day, Deanna remembers feeling both elated and deeply worried at the same time — the scientist in her was excited about the extraordinary data the instruments on the…

Brian Mapes fell in love with cumulus clouds when he was looking out an airplane window during his first flight, on the way to Iowa to toil in the fields with his uncle. He was struck by their beauty, but also wanted to understand them scientifically.  In particular, Brian got interested in how clouds, which…

Vishal Vasan, an applied mathematician at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bangalore, India, thinks of himself as a “mathematical salesman”, who uses his mathematical tools and expertise to help potential collaborators in other fields. Vishal’s particular interest are problems involving partial differential equations,their properties and behavior, and methods for solving them, whether on…

Sulochana Gadgil has had a life-long fascination with the Asian monsoon, the seasonally shifting wind pattern driving the rain storms which are the lifeblood of India’s agricultural economy. Born in Pune, she studied mathematics in India and the USA – at Harvard and MIT – before returning to India, where she was a professor at…

Melanie Bieli is a special guest in more than one way. She’s the first junior scientist to appear on Deep Convection, having just finished her Ph.D. a year ago; but more importantly, she’s the co-creator and creative director of the podcast. So she has been part of all the previous episodes, silently — but on…

For Ed Sarachik, professor emeritus at the University of Washington, science and art have always been complementary but equally important ingredients to an intellectually fulfilling life. When he was a physics major at Queens College in New York City, his art teacher gave him an assignment that would become a formative art experience: Spending hours…

Amy Clement, professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, loves the ocean. We are mentioning this because her research may seem to suggest otherwise: Amy has proposed bold and controversial ideas about how the role of the ocean in controlling several modes of variability of the climate system may…

Faye McNeill studies aerosols, small liquid or solid particles floating in the atmosphere. Each cubic centimeter of air contains hundreds or thousands of these particles – some of them are natural (e.g., dust from dry regions or salt from the ocean) and others are released into the air by human activity, e.g., by cars or…