Prof. Businger joined UH in 1993, where and he previously held a tenured position at North Carolina State University. The draw of the Hawaiian climate, the Pacific Ocean, and the opportunity to work in the robust Meteorology department here at UH was irresistible. Since then, he has definitely made his mark. He now leads the Storm Evolution and Energetics Research (SEER) Group, and supports five graduate students. His projects include understanding and predicting storms through observation and numerical studies, predicting how stable the weather will be for observations by astronomers, and 'vog' prediction over Kona. You can read about the weather balloons his group uses in one of these projects for NOAA to validate numerical results from his MM5 modeling, in the November 2006 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Volume 87, Number 11.
Prof. Businger and his students with one of the weather balloons used to collect data.
He also utilizes a grid of sensors over the Pacific Ocean to detect lightning and then interprets that data to forecast rainfall and storm intensity.
The high-resolution weather predictions used in Prof. Businger's projects have been processed to date on a supercomputer in Hilo, which is part of the Japanese Subaru Observatory. However as the lease on the Subaru computer resources come to an end, he will soon join many UH faculty that use MHPCC resources under the Educational Partnership Agreement, which is part of the agreement UH has in place as a result of our management of the center. Welcome to our group of users!
Meanwhile, in addition to Meteorology 101, he teaches Synoptic Meteorology and Satellite Meteorology. In his spare time he enjoys photography, surfing, and plays the guitar, and piano.
Find out more about the SEER group, his projects, even view the class syllabi at http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/MET/Faculty/businger/highlights.html.
