Storm-centered animations
I developed storm-centered animations to depict the evolution of tropical cyclones (TCs) as revealed by geostationary satellite imagery. Most animations show infrared cloud-top temperatures within 600 km of the interpolated TC center. These animations are limited by the frequency of full-disk observations, which increased to 15 minutes with the launch of the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) and further increased to 10 minutes in early 2019. Himawari-8/9 full-disk imagery is also available every 10 minutes.These images are generated via Python using data hosted by AWS. Click here for the GOES bucket and click here for the Himawari bucket. GOES data are directly accessed via Python's boto package; Himawari DAT files are downloaded and then converted to netCDF via axitools before images can be produced. Finally, ffmpeg creates MP4 video files from the Python images.
The color scale in degrees Celsius is available in the image at this link. I also provide example Python code showing how to generate the colormap yourself.
View the full tropical lifecycle (a 2-week period) of Hurricane Dorian (2019) below. Displayed intensity (wind speed) is limited to the nearest 5 kt because HURDAT2 values are provided to an accuracy of 5 kt.
Undergraduate academic advising
Click here for information on undergraduate academic advising for meteorology majors in the Department of Geosciences. Dr. Wood is departing MSU in summer 2023, thus their advisees will receive a new advisor to discuss coursework during Fall 2023.About Kim Wood
In pre-pandemic times, I provided briefings on tropical weather during the North Atlantic and eastern North Pacific hurricane seasons in the Department of Geosciences at Mississippi State University. This picture was taken on 26 August 2019 when we talked about then-Tropical Storm Dorian. This discussion occurred nearly one week before eventual Hurricane Dorian devastated multiple islands in the Bahamas.
Before moving to the University of Arizona in August 2023, I was an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences and part of the Meteorology team. I love pretty much every aspect of the tropics and can talk about tropical meteorology all day, but much of my research concentrates on tropical cyclone intensity, structural evolution, large-scale variability, effects on land, and satellite-based methods of tropical analysis.
I taught courses on tropical meteorology, satellite meteorology, physical meteorology, and research methods. I believe every operational meteorologist should have some exposure to research and every research meteorologist should have some exposure to operations. I was also a member of the 2019 American Geophysical Union's Voices for Science cohort, during which I actively worked on communication of hazard information and how to explain the behavior of various weather phenomena.
I've been fascinated by hurricanes for most of my life, so I studied physics as an undergraduate student at Oregon State University with a focus on geophysics. I then attended graduate school at the University of Arizona, where I earned my MS and PhD degrees in atmospheric science.