Dr. David M. Schultz
CURRENT RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Flash Flooding and Potential Vorticity
I collaborated with Steve Decker, a Research Experience for
Undergraduate student in the summer of 1998. He was an undergrad
at Iowa State.
The goal was to see the extent to which mid- and upper-tropospheric
potential vorticity anomalies precede flash-flooding events. Steve's
research found that for five cases he examined, four of the cases
suggested that looking for these potential vorticity anomalies was a
useful precursor to flash floods.
While this is suggestive, there are many caveats that remain
unanswered at this time.
- How many PV anomalies are not associated with flash flood events?
- How do we distinguish PV anomalies that will produce flash floods
from those which will not produce a flash flood?
- Since the scale of many of these PV anomalies are too small to be
detected by the observational network, how do we go about forecasting
these events?
This work was presented at the 19th Severe Local Storms Conference in
Minneapolis, MN.
If you have any further
questions about the research discussed here, or desire a manuscript,
please feel free to write to me: david.schultz@noaa.gov.
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