Grad Student Award

Grad Student Award

Mon April 23rd, 2012
Helen Hill

Dan ChavasDan Chavas has won this year's Max Eaton Prize for the best student paper at the American Meteorological Society's 30th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology held last week in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.

Dan is trying to understand what determines the size (i.e. diameter) of a hurricane, which is not well understood and in nature is relatively independent of how fast its fastest winds are.  The work he presented used a computer model of a hurricane in a simplified physical environment to determine the fundamental aspects of this environment that serve to modulate the final size of the model storm.

Dan is a 4th year graduate student in the atmospheric science program. His research focuses on the dynamics of tropical cyclones with a specific focus on the mechanisms that control the size (i.e. diameter) of a given storm. He also has a keen interest in the science of climate change, as well as the economic, political, and social aspects of such complex socio-technical problems. He is also a member of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and an executive member of the MIT Science Policy Initiative (SPI).

Prior to arriving at MIT, he worked as an intern at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland and as a research associate studying climate change impacts on agriculture in China at the Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, MD. As an undergraduate at UW-Madison, he worked with Professor Michael Morgan on African Easterly Wave tropical cyclogenesis from a quasi-geostrophic potential vorticity perspective. 

Congratulations Dan!

D. Chavas and K. Emanuel, (2012) Equilibrium Tropical Cyclone Size in an Idealized State of Axisymmetric Radiative-Convective Equilibrium