Professor Sonia Lasher-Trapp
Purdue University Department of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
Professor Lasher-Trapp converses with Desert Research Institute scientists aboard the NCAR C130 aircraft prior to takeoff.CV (PDF) Phone: 765-496-2866
E-mail: slasher@purdue.eduI'm a native Hoosier, having grown up in Southern Indiana. As a child I enjoyed watching thunderstorms but was also frightened by the prospect of a tornado hitting our house, especially during the night. At my parents' urging (they were tired of being awakened in the middle of the night by my warnings that we should all retreat to the basement), I decided to learn more about these weather phenomena.
I attended St. Louis University for my undergraduate education in atmospheric science, and afterward attended the University of Oklahoma for my graduate degrees in meteorology. At Oklahoma I satisfied some of my curiosity of thunderstorms and tornadoes, but discovered a new interest as well: cloud physics. I wondered how those storms produce the varied types and amounts of precipitation that they do. Then I discovered that some of the fundamentals of precipitation formation are yet unknown, even in smaller cumulus clouds. This led me to my doctoral research, and has continued to the present day. After receiving my Ph.D. at Oklahoma I acquired a post-doctoral appointment in the Advanced Study Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO, where I worked with some of the top cloud physicists in the field, and I continued these collaborations in residence at NCAR as a research scientist for the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Most of this work was still studying cumulus clouds and precipitations processes, especially the "warm rain process" whereby clouds produce rain in the absence of ice in the cloud.
I joined the faculty here in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Purdue University in January 2003, coming nearly "full circle" geographically. Here at Purdue, I've initiated a Cloud Microphysics Group to research clouds and precipitation processes. Our group acquires and analyzes field observations including radar and aircraft data and employs computer modeling to test our ideas and interpret the observations. A current major focus of our work is rain formation in trade wind cumulus clouds, but our work has branched into studying winter stratiform clouds and the problematic aircraft icing that may result, as well as the numerical simulation of hailstorms. Collaborative work with visualization specialists here at Purdue in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department is also proving quite fruitful in developing better visualization tools for both numerical modeling results and observational analysis.
I enjoy having a research group to discuss new ideas (and revisit old ones), and take great satisfaction in assisting students to become better scientists. Although some of our research is very fundamental, our group has high hopes that we are producing results of great benefit to society, whether it be by leading to better precipitation forecasts or understanding the roles of clouds and precipitation in regional and global climate change.
