School of Meteorology Student Granted AMS Graduate Fellowship

Erin Jones, a part of the new class of Meteorology graduate students, was awarded a 2019 AMS Graduate Fellowship.

This is a highly competitive and prestigious honor. Fellowship recipients go through a long selection process. Once selected, they are awarded a $25,000 stipend to pursue graduate studies.

“I am honored to have received the AMS Fellowship.  I see it as a tribute to the excellent mentorship I have received from my previous professors and research advisors.  It also motivates me to push forward with enthusiasm with my graduate studies at the University of Oklahoma” said Erin Jones.

Before coming to OU she completed her undergraduate studies at Millersville University. She graduated with a major in meteorology and a double minor in math and environmental hazards and emergency management.

Now beginning graduate school, Erin reflects on where her passion for meteorology began,

“When I was very young—perhaps only four or five years old—I could sit and watch The Weather Channel for hours at a time.  As I grew older, my interest in the weather blossomed as well, and because I also found that I was quite adept in my math and science classes in school, I thought that meteorology would be a good fit for me to study in college” she told us.

So far in her educational career, she has had many opportunities to intern and do research.

“The summer after my freshman year at Millersville, I completed a summer research internship at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where I worked on a project studying the contribution of lake-effect snow to annual snowfall totals in the vicinity of Lakes Michigan, Erie, and Ontario.  The following summer, I participated in an REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) at Texas A&M University where I studied statistical comparisons and simulations of supercells in environments with varying significant tornado parameters.  During my junior year, I participated in the Student Experience in Airborne Research in the Mid-Atlantic Region (SEAR-MAR), which was an NSF educational deployment of the University of Wyoming King Air aircraft.  During that, I assisted with setting up the instruments and forecasting, and I was a crew member on one of the flights.  After the deployment, I based my honors thesis assimilating some of the data collected during the project to the WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting) model. The summer after my junior year, I completed my NOAA Hollings internship at the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory/Hurricane Research Division where I conducted research on spiral gravity waves radiating from tropical cyclones (and got to ride on a NOAA Hurricane Hunters research flight into Tropical Storm Chris as it was intensifying into a hurricane).  Following my graduation last December, I spent the spring semester interning at Brookhaven National Laboratory as part of the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program where I studied updraft signatures in radar wind profiler data collected in Argentina” Erin told us.

Now here at the School of Meteorology, Erin will be working with Dr. Xuguang Wang on a project focusing on improving techniques to achieve multi-scale data assimilation in operational models and evaluating their impacts on tropical cyclone forecasts.

Congratulations to Erin on this amazing accomplishment, we are excited to have her as part of the graduate program.