Assistant professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science (EOAS), Allison Wing, conducts hurricane simulations to study how storms in the tropics are affected by and interact with climate. Dr. Wing and her team create and analyze computer models of tropical clouds, hurricanes and atmospheric processes to try to understand how hurricanes are formed. These models allow Dr. Wing and her team to simulate experiments unavailable in the real world. However, simulating a hurricane requires a lot of computing power, so Dr. Wing uses the Research Computing Center’s HPC cluster to model these storms.

When discussing her motivation, Dr. Wing says, “All of us here in Florida have an idea of the impact hurricanes can have on society, and that’s something that really motivates me, realizing how much damage they can do.” Her work is geared towards better understanding the phenomenon of hurricanes, their formation, what controls their intensity and how they’ll change in a future climate. This allows her and her team to explore how storms in the tropics will interact with climate and how our climate may be changing in the future. As a result, Dr. Wing’s research is able to facilitate weather forecasts and enhance storm preparations. 

“By providing a computing resource that makes it possible to do these types of simulations, RCC enables our work. It’s really great that we have [the RCC] as a resource here.”