William Boos (University of California, Berkeley)

William Boos (University of California, Berkeley)

Speaker: William Boos

Title: Monsoon depressions:  Mechanisms & trends of high-impact storms at the edge of the Tropics

Abstract: Much of the rain that falls in the monsoon circulations that dominate the climate of Earth's tropics is delivered by transient, propagating vortices.  These storms are neither typhoons nor classical extratropical baroclinic waves, but another type of synoptic-scale disturbance that has remained poorly understood.  In this talk I focus on the manifestation of these vortices in South Asia, where they are called monsoon depressions; I present theory for their genesis and growth that has developed over the past five years.  I discuss historical trends in the frequency of monsoon depressions and what we know, and still need to learn, about how the extreme rainfall they produce will change in the future.

Bio: William Boos is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science and leads a research group on climate dynamics.  His main work focuses on improve fundamental understanding of the mechanisms controlling tropical climate, with a particular focus on monsoons, tropical cyclones, and the extreme weather events that affect Africa, Asia, and other continental regions.  He is a Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, an editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, and the Equity Advisor for Berkeley’s Earth and Planetary Science department.  Before moving to Berkeley, he was a faculty member at Yale for seven years and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.  He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton