EAS Seminar: Colin Zarzycki ’08 (Penn State)

Bio:
Prior to arriving at Penn State, Colin Zarzycki ‘08 was a project scientist jointly in the Climate and Global Dynamics and Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology laboratories at the National Center for Atmospheric Research after two years as an Advanced Study Program postdoctoral fellow.

Prof. Zarzycki completed his Ph.D. in atmospheric science at the University of Michigan after receiving an M.S. in environmental engineering at the University of Illinois. His undergraduate degree is also in atmospheric science from Cornell University.

His research is, broadly, centered around simulating extreme atmospheric phenomena and bridging the gap between weather and climate. In particular, he is focused on cutting-edge, high-resolution modeling techniques. This allows for multiple research directions, including regional weather and climate prediction on timescales ranging from days to decades, the development of dynamical cores and sub-grid physical parameterizations, and software engineering on petascale computing systems. Prof. Zarzycki has also used these techniques to investigate tropical cyclone dynamics in global climate models and to improve the community’s capability to objectively detect weather extremes in “big (climate) data.”