Kara Hartig
2024 Visiting Fellow Post Doc
- Ph.D., Physics, Harvard University, 2024
- Sc.B., Physics, Brown University, 2018
Research Interests
Kara Hartig is a postdoc at CIRES through the Visiting Fellows Program. Her research is centered on the Arctic, with a particular focus on clouds and their effects on surface conditions, influences on North American extreme weather, and upwards and downwards interactions with the stratosphere. She uses a combination of models and observations to tease out the physical mechanisms driving atmospheric conditions in the Arctic and how they might change in a warmer climate.
Current Research
Revealing the Drivers of Arctic Cloud Regimes and Their Surface Impacts: Arctic clouds play a central role in determining how much energy is absorbed by the underlying land, ocean, and sea ice. Particularly in winter, when there is no direct sunlight, clouds trap heat released by the ocean or land to keep the surface warm whereas clear skies allow the surface to radiate freely and cool rapidly. The amount of time spent in cloudy versus clear conditions helps to set the surface temperature and surface energy budget, but the mechanisms controlling those time scales and their response to a rapidly warming Arctic are unclear. Hartig's postdoctoral research uses a combination of ground-based measurements and a high-resolution weather model to identify key time scales of cloud formation and dissipation and their predictability based on conditions upwind.
Research Categories
Atmosphere, Climate and Weather, CryosphereVisiting Fellow
to
2026 -HARVARD UNIVERSITYRevealing the Drivers of Arctic Cloud Regimes and Their Surface Impacts
For her postdoctoral research, she proposes using an air mass transformation framework to investigate the research question: What are the time scales and meteorological conditions that control Arctic cloud regimes and their impact on the surface energy budget? The title of her project is Revealing the Drivers of Arctic Cloud Regimes and Their Surface Impacts. This project will help to reveal the time scales and meteorological conditions that control the state of Arctic clouds and, by extension, Arctic surface conditions in a rapidly changing climate. Quantifying the dependence of those time scales on environmental conditions will help us predict cloud regime transitions, their response to climate change, and their impact on surface conditions across the broad range of environmental contexts encountered in the Arctic.Sponsors
-
Invalid dateP.I.(s)
About CECA
CECA connects and creates a supportive environment for graduate students and postdocs who come from various academic units to do research in CIRES.