My research currently involves several projects with the National Weather Service to improve forecast and analysis methods. The objective of one project is to develop improved guidance for forecasting the onshore movement of coastal fronts. These fronts often form just off the North Carolina coast in winter and sometimes move inland bringing unseasonably warm weather to coastal areas and initiating the development of low-pressure systems. This work is in collaboration with Drs. Gary Lackmann and Lian Xie as well as Weather Service offices in Greer, South Carolina, Raleigh, Wilmington and Newport, North Carolina, and Wakefield, Virginia.

A second area of interest is to try to determine why Tropical Storm Danny intensified as it moved over North Carolina in July 1997. Tropical cyclones normally deteriorate inland, but Danny's wind speeds rapidly intensified while the storm was over the central part of the state. In the process of this research, we may also be able to establish methods for using Doppler radar to see the detailed wind fields within nearby storms.