Mimi Hughes

Research Interests

Mimi's research involves investigating aspects of the climate system that are unresolvable by traditional climate models. Previous climate studies have involved global models with spatial resolutions on the order of hundreds of kilometers. This prevents them from resolving critical aspects of important climate variables, such as surface temperature and precipitation, especially in areas of complex topography such as California and coastal Greenland. Meanwhile, the few studies that involve a higher spatial resolution generally do so by sacrificing the temporal coverage of the data, providing them with a 'case study' point of view of a particular weather event, rather than robust statistics required for an understanding of climate. Her current research efforts investigate the dynamics of the Sierra Barrier Jet and Santa Ana winds of California, but in the near future her efforts will expand to investigate dynamically similar processes in the Arctic.