Tyler Hanke

Hello! I am a graduate student studying atmospheric science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and am being advised by Dr. Cristian Proistosescu.

The overall nature of my research is to help the community understand climate variability better and reduce the uncertainty in the cloud radiative feedback. As it stands, the uncertainty in the cloud radiative feedback is the largest source of uncertainty in estimates of future climate predictions, and the largest uncertainty in the cloud radiative feedback stems from disagreement on how low-clouds are affected by changes in the pattern of surface warming, and how that feeds back into the energy budget of the Earth. Global Circulation Models (GCMs) predict near uniform warming of the Earth's surface, while observations and GCMs forced with historical patterns suggest dipole areas of warming and cooling of the Earth's surface.

In order to address this discrepancy, my research aims to identify the relationship between the pattern of surface warming, low-clouds, and their impact on the Earth's energy budget in the observational satellite record. The most apparent change in the pattern of surface warming within the observational record is the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), so my work focuses on quantifying the above relationships during the build-up, peak, and dissipation of ENSO events.

Additionally, I want to understand the physics driving these relationships, so I am looking to deconstruct these relationships using "cloud-controlling factor (CCF) decomposition". Using anomalies in CCF meteorological fields and their associated radiative kernels, I hope to be able to reconstruct the total ENSO energy cycle and identify key CCF drivers of ENSO variability in the climate system.