IMSP Public Lecture: William Boos (UC Berkeley) (11 Nov 2024)

Title: Mechanisms, trends, and forecasts of monsoon depressions: High-impact storms at the edge of Earth’s tropics
Speaker: Dr. William Boos, University of California, Berkeley
venue: IITM Pune
Abstract: Much of the rain that falls in the monsoon circulations that dominate the climate of Earth's tropics is delivered by transient, propagating atmospheric vortices. In India these storms are known as monsoon low pressure systems; they are neither typhoons nor classical extratropical cyclones, but another type of system that has remained poorly understood despite its role in generating the majority of catastrophic flooding in the region. In this talk I present new fundamental understanding of the genesis, amplification, and dynamical structure of these storms. I discuss historical trends in the frequency of monsoon depressions, projections for how the extreme rainfall that they produce will change over this century, and new short-term operational predictions of monsoon depression activity.
About the speaker: Dr. 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 in climate dynamics. Before moving to Berkeley, he was a faculty member at Yale for seven years and received his Ph.D. from MIT. His work focuses on monsoons, tropical cyclones, and a range of extreme weather events; he often combines theory, observational analyses, and numerical models to determine the fundamental mechanisms governing atmospheric and climate phenomena. 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.