Professor Stevens came to University of Hawaii as the Chair of the Meteorology Department from Colorado State University, where he had been for 11 years. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University in 1977, then postdoc'd at University of Washington before taking an academic position at Colorado State in 1978.
He remained chair of the department for 3 1/2 years, and now continues to teach and do research. His specialty is Atmospheric Dynamics, or understanding how physics applies to the fluid motion in the atmosphere. We know this field today as meteorology, first introduced by Aristotle as the study of all the physical regions above the surface of the earth. Today, however, the field does not include space or astronomy, but considers only the near-earth atmosphere and weather.
Prof. Stevens enjoys teaching classes at all levels, and teaches MET200: Descriptive Meteorology and MET495: Undergraduate Thesis. He also has recently taught Numerical Weather Prediction and Programming for Meteorologists. Watch for them to be offered again. Along with his two Ph.D. students and one undergraduate student, he researches mesoscale prediction of weather in the Hawaiian islands and the effects of upper atmospheric flows on typhoon motion. His research has been funded by the Pacific Disaster Center, NASA, the U.S. Forest Service, the MHPCC Engagement Grants, NSF, and the Office of Naval Research. (Read about Guangxia Cao's work on mesoscale modeling of the Halloween flood on Oahu. Guangxia is one of Prof. Stevens' graduate students.)
Prof. Stevens has used the supercomputers at Maui High Performance Center (MHPCC) since 1998, collaborating first with William Smith, and now with Kevin Roe. They started out using the Regional Spectral Model (RSM), then progressed to the MM5 (5th version of mesoscale) model, and now uses the widely accepted WRF (Weather Research and Forecast) Model. One of the features of this model is that it can be used in research, but also for routine forecasts, so that students can go right to work in industry or government using the same model they used at the university.
As the models evolve and specialize, they stay true to the physics on the scale of the model, but at some level, there are necessarily assumptions, typically at smaller scale. Prof. Stevens and his students are working on conceptual models to fine tune these assumptions and improve the models.
A point of history - Duane was in the first class of Presidential Young Investigators at Colorado State University in 1984. Visit his web site to read more about his work.
