PAOC Spotlights

A climate scientist, Cronin’s research focuses on convection, radiation, and clouds to create numerical modeling experiments that help us understand the stability of the Earth’s climate. Cronin has explored subjects such as the formation of cold air and how it will change with a warming climate, cloud clustering in the tropics, and hurricane formation in dry atmospheric models.

Recent news includes discovering the mechanism by which aerosols intensify thunderstorms in tropical regions; Cronin’s lab used simulations of cloud dynamics to find that high concentrations of aerosols increased humidity in the surrounding clouds, increasing thunderstorm activity. This “humidity-entrainment” mechanism can now be incorporated into weather and climate models to help them better predict thunderstorm activity in regions with changing aerosol levels.

Cronin joined the faculty in 2016 after doing postdoctoral work at Harvard. He holds a PhD in Climate Physics and Chemistry from MIT.