Dan Chavas

Welcome!

News:

• We have an open position for a post-doctoral researcher in climate physics and hurricanes, associated with Dan's NSF CAREER award just awarded in 2020 (!). We are also always looking for excellent graduate students! Please contact Dan at dchavas@purdue.edu if you are interested.
• Dan has been awarded an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award! This is a 5-year award grant to study climate controls on the subtropical high and hurricane landfall risk, and to develop a weather and climate risk internship program to put atmospheric science graduates in positions to help use weather and climate information to make better decisions.
• I’m trying something new: short YouTube recorded presentations on content from recently published papers -- check out the Research page or go straight to my YouTube playlist of presentations. I spend so much time making nice engaging presentations for seminars, I might as well share them publicly.
• Exciting recent papers:
  • Could we fit more hurricanes on Earth in the present-day climate? Yes, the thermodynamic environment would allow an order of magnitude more storms than is currently observed each year. This suggests that the favorable parts of the climate system are not densely packed, and thus some other aspect of internal dynamics must limit the annual number of hurricanes globally. (Led by post-doc Kim Hoogewind)
  • What sets hurricane genesis rate and storm size vs. latitude? Aquaplanet experiments varying planetary rotation rate and radius show i) hurricane genesis rate exhibits a universal rate of increase with the Coriolis parameter and, ii) hurricane outer size scales with the Rhines scale (a new, better theory at long last!);
  • Do hurricanes need water (or any condensible species) to exist? Hurricanes form and persist in dry and/or cold atmospheres (wild!).

About me:

I am currently Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Science at Purdue University in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. My group is called the Climate and Extreme Weather Laboratory. We research the physics and impacts of extreme weather in our atmosphere, including hurricanes and tornadoes, and their dependence on climate. Here is a bit of insight into the philosophy behind our research.

Before starting at Purdue, I was an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University, and I received my PhD in Atmospheric Science from MIT. Outside of science, I enjoy gardening, tennis, photography, biking, running, and attempting to bake the perfect loaf of bread. My wife is Lead Analyst at CB Insights, and we have a small, fearless toddler daughter named Maya.