Luke Allen Postdoctor

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Meteorology at SU under the supervision of professor Annica Ekman. I am primarily interested in cloud and precipitation processes, and my current research is on changes in precipitation in the Amazon region with changes in aerosol concentrations, aerosol composition, land use, and sea surface temperatures.

As part of Horizon Europe's Clouds and climate transitioning to post-fossil aerosol regime (CleanCloud) project, I am working on 100-m scale simulations of unorganized deep convection to test the sensitivity of convective structure, lifespan, intensity, and precipitation output to changes in aerosol properties. I am also analyzing global, decadal-scale, convection-resolving atmospheric simulations in association with nextGEMS for the sensitivity of the precipitation and moisture budget in the Amazon to increased sea surface temperature.

I earned my B.S. in Meteorology from North Carolina State University in 2018. I completed a M.S. in Atmospheric Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where my thesis research on entrainment in cloud-resolving simulations of developing deep convection was supervised by Dr. Sonia Lasher-Trapp. I returned to NC State for a Ph.D. in Geospatial Analytics with Dr. Sandra Yuter as my supervisor. My Ph.D. research involved synthesizing different types of observations (in situ, remote sensing, ground-based, and airborne) to gain insights into snow growth processes in synoptically-forced winter storms in the Northeast and Midwest United States, as part of the NASA IMPACTS project.