Bridgette Mason

I work with Dr. Trent Ford, who is the Illinois State Climatologist, and collaborators from The Ohio State University on a NSF project investigating soil moisture-precipitation feedbacks in the Central U.S.. The goal of this project is to improve process-level understanding of the surface and boundary layer processes that are important to warm season (May - September) convection initiation in the Central U.S.. Soil moisture feedbacks to convective precipitation are not well represented in Earth system models due to the lack of clear understanding of the key physical processes that control these feedbacks. This project utilizes soil moisture observations from the National Soil Moisture Network to accurately represent soil moisture conditions underlying convection initiation, and leverages thousands of convection events identified by the ThOR algorithm. The long-term research goal is to use this knowledge to improve the accuracy of simulations of these soil moisture-atmosphere interactions and resultant convective precipitation feedback processes in models.