Ph.D Student Receives Honorable Mention at 2019 AMS

Ph.D student, Monte Flora was awarded an honorable mention for his presentation, Neighborhood Verification of 1-h Probabilistic Low-Level Rotation Forecasts from the NSSL Experimental Warn-on-Forecast System, at the 2019 AMS Conference.

This is his second time presenting at AMS. The first time Flora presented was the last time AMS was in Phoenix when he presented research from his undergraduate research experience.

His latest presentation came about during his time as a Ph.D student,

“I expressed interest in implementing machine learning to post-process forecasts from the NSSL Experimental Warn-on-Forecast System for ensembles (NEWS-e) and my master advisor (who was also my REU advisor) took me on as a Ph.D. student.  Although I also gave an oral presentation on my machine learning research at the Artificial Intelligence conference (at the annual meeting), I got the honorable mention for my research on a novel verification method for storm-scale, short-term probabilistic forecasts. Developing an appropriate verification method was necessary to assess potential improvements from machine learning calibration. “

Monte Flora

Flora spent about a month putting together his presentation and went through it hundreds of times before getting to the conference in January.

Flora was able to enjoy more than just the conference during his time in Arizona,

“On this trip, I was able to travel with my wife. I attended the conference during the day and during the evening explored downtown Phoenix. We were able to see two movies at the downtown AMC theatre and ate dinner in the rotating restaurant atop the Hyatt. “

Monte Flora

Congratulations to Monte on his accomplishment!