University Of Oklahoma Researchers Working To Advance Predictability Research İnitiatives

Faculty from the University of Oklahoma School of Meteorology are leading the school's predictability research initiatives with multiple projects that could one day lead to more accurate forecasts of weather-related events, including landslides and tornadoes. In the Southern Plains region of the United States, people think of thunderstorms and tornadoes when severe weather is forecasted. However, the OU School of Meteorology is interested in a broad range of weather phenomena and its impacts.

As an example of the breadth of OU's program, one of the researchers, Lance Leslie, OU School of Meteorology professor, examined how an advanced numerical modeling system could project rain-triggered landslides in a future warming climate. His article "Predicting Storm-triggered Landslides," a collaborative effort with researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, was featured on the cover of the February 2011 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

For this study, the researchers made projections of landslide occurrence in the upcoming 10 years over a region of Southern California. A process-based modeling system, SEGMENT (Scalable and Extensible Geofluid Model of the Environment), was used for Leslie's landslide research.

"SEGMENT is a tool that allows not only for the investigation of the triggering factors in landslides, but also for other geofluid flows such as glacier and ice-sheet melting and their impact on global fresh water supplies and on sea level rises," said Leslie.

Modeling systems is not new to Leslie and his fellow professors at OU. Theodore Trafalis, OU School of Industrial Engineering professor, and Michael Richman, OU School of Meteorology professor, won first place for the only two awards given at the Artificial Neural Networks in Engineering conference in late 2010.