About

Professor Mark Miller is a faculty member at Rutgers University, specializing in Atmospheric Science. His research focuses on clouds, which he describes as dreamy, dazzlingly beautiful, and intricately complex. He is involved in research related to atmospheric phenomena, contributing to the understanding of cloud dynamics and their visual and physical properties. Based at Rutgers' New Brunswick campus, he is actively engaged in teaching and research activities within the department, and his contact information is available for academic and professional inquiries.

Research topics

• Environmental science
• Climatology
• Meteorology
• Geology
• Atmospheric sciences
• Physics
• Geography
• Oceanography
• Mechanics

Selected publications

• Competition response of cloud supersaturation explains diminished Twomey effect for smoky aerosol in the tropical Atlantic

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-03-24 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The Twomey effect brightens clouds by increasing aerosol concentrations, which activates more droplets and decreases cloud supersaturation in response to more competition for water vapor. To quantify this competition response, we used marine low cloud observations in clean and smoky conditions at Ascension Island in the tropical South Atlantic during the Layered Aerosol Smoke Interactions with Cloud (LASIC) campaign. These observations show similar increases in droplet number for increased accumulation-mode particles from surface-based and satellite cloud retrievals, demonstrating the importance of below-cloud aerosol measurements for retrieving aerosol-cloud interactions (ACI) in clean and smoky aerosol conditions. Four methods for estimating cloud supersaturation from aerosol-cloud measurements were compared, with cloud scene-based and parcel-based methods showing sufficient variability for a strong dependence on both aerosol accumulation number concentration and cloud-base updraft velocities. Decomposing aerosol-related changes in cloud albedo and optical depth shows the calculated competition response accounts for dampening the activation response by 12 to 35%, explaining the diminished Twomey effect at high aerosol concentrations observed for smoky conditions at LASIC and previously around the world. This result was consistent for independent supersaturation retrievals by cloud scene-based droplet number and cloud condensation nuclei and parcel-based multimode size-resolving Lagrangian methods. Translating aerosol effects to local radiative forcing with clean conditions as a proxy for preindustrial and smoky conditions for present-day showed that the competition response reduces cooling from the Twomey radiative forcing by 12 to 35%, providing an essential process-specific constraint for improving the representation of aerosol competition in climate model simulation of indirect aerosol forcing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Therapeutic radiation directly alters bone fatigue strength and microdamage accumulation

  Journal of the mechanical behavior of biomedical materials/Journal of mechanical behavior of biomedical materials · 2024-10-02 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Climate-resource scenarios to inform climate change adaptation in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve: Summary of 2021 climate change scenario planning

  National Park Service · 2024-01-01

  report

  This report illustrates use of scenario planning as a climate change adaptation tool supporting Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve?s Resource Stewardship Strategy. The primary objective of scenario planning is to help resource managers and scientists make management and planning decisions informed by assessments of critical future uncertainties. This report outlines a process that synthesized future climate projections into three distinct but plausible and relevant climate summaries for the focal area and used them to develop climate-resource scenarios through participatory scenario planning. Initial steps identified the priority resource management topics and the corresponding related climate uncertainties. Next, local climate summaries were used to develop divergent climate futures: those that describe the broadest possible range of plausible conditions while capturing relevant uncertainty. The final phase further developed the climate futures and their resource implications. These participatory scenario planning exercises occurred virtually in fall (August?November) 2021. The climate-resource scenarios informed adaptation strategies in conjunction with the park?s Resource Stewardship Strategy development. The scope and complexity of this effort is unique but elements from the scenarios and resource implications have broad applicability to other large, protected areas in Alaska and Northwest Canada.

  PublisherDOI

• The Anthropocene and Trans Literature

  2024-04-04 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter summarizes several critical epistemological genealogies (critical race theory, trans studies, and Lyellian geological deep time) as an enmeshed framework for answering the following question: What does the Anthropocene have to do with trans*-ness and with trans literature? The Anthropocene, or the age of the human, is a narrative of transition. This geological epoch is a hot debate about how humanity has unquestionably changed the earth and continues to effect and shape its surfaces. The various records of anthropogenic degradation in the rock record as well as the alterations within sediment layers and strata that reflect unprecedented industrialization and globalization (extraction, exploitation, enforced migration of bodies), is by extension, an archive of the category of gender’s own transition. Such a framework destabilizes gender as a result of the deepening intimate contacts between bodies of matter, human, and nonhuman. A theory of deep time where the earth is billions, not merely thousands of years old, offers an alternative, zoomed-out scope and scale for observing and witnessing the human and by extension its sociopolitical conceptions of both race and gender. These sliding scales of transition are not siphoned off from one another—meaning racial differentiations may transform gender designations may transform species classifications may transform life itself. This chapter describes and builds on Black studies scholars Sylvia Wynter and C. Riley Snorton’s reparative work on the twin developments of the Anthropocene and the racial category “Black.” The chapter considers historical and contemporary novels and short story collections by both trans and non-trans people alike. The nineteenth-century novels offer touchstones for perceiving literary developments in representations of race and gender as a result of the expanding circulation of geological acceptance of the earth’s ineffable age. Contemporary novels by queer authors with trans characters set during the nineteenth century’s collision of deep time, colonialism, and capitalism recover histories of transness and imply that their legibility requires the rock record. Trans authors turn to the lithosphere, and in doing so, offer the trans body as the necessary salve to the environmental degradations wrought by the Anthropocene that produced their—our—trans bodies in the first place.

  PublisherDOI

• PL’s Proposed High Accuracy Service and Comparison to Galileo HAS and IGS Products

  Proceedings of the Satellite Division's International Technical Meeting (Online)/Proceedings of the Satellite Division's International Technical Meeting (CD-ROM) · 2024-10-09

  article

  The Global Differential GPS (GDGPS) is a complete real-time GNSS monitoring and augmentation system with decades of experience in precise orbit determination. As part of JPL’s GDGPS group’s transition to public funding, it is intended to publicly provide access to high-quality satellite corrections in a High Accuracy System (HAS) to users over the Internet, with potential to support GPS. In its current initial offering, GDGPS HAS mainly consists of high-quality satellite orbit and clock corrections, with additional limited support for satellite code biases. In later versions, corrections will also include more comprehensive support for satellite code biases, together with support for satellite phase biases to allow for user PPP with ambiguity resolution (AR). The corrections are provided in two redundant streams, with one stream supporting GPS and Galileo, and the other supporting GPS and GLONASS. Analysis of the quality of the corrections and of PPP solutions based on these products attests to the quality of the corrections. Rms of the User Range Errors (URE) relative to post-processed products are found to be approximately 6 cm for GPS and 7 cm for Galileo. For GLONASS, the standard deviation is approximately 4 cm. PPP results show good performance as well, with PPP solutions equivalent to solutions generated based on real-time Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) products, and better than solutions generated based on Galileo HAS Internet-based products. The results attest to the adequacy of GDGPS HAS as augmentation to GPS, Galileo, and GLONASS.

  PublisherDOI

• Diagnosing Excessive Subsidence Across the Southeast Atlantic in the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) During ORACLES‐1

  Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres · 2024-12-02 · 2 citations

  article

  Abstract Complicated by seasonal transport of biomass burning aerosol plumes primarily overlaying the marine stratocumulus‐to‐cumulus transition, the complexity of the atmosphere over the southeast Atlantic Ocean is difficult to represent in models. Biases with respect to the height of the aerosol plume and excessive subsidence have previously been documented in MERRA‐2. This paper further diagnoses these biases, and addresses the unreasonable subsidence over the southeast Atlantic region currently simulated by the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) model during the first deployment of the ORACLES campaign in September 2016. Our study is based on model simulations where the meteorological state is constrained by the GEOS‐based MERRA‐2 reanalysis, as well as by ERA5, using the so‐called replay technique. Free running simulations with the GEOS model show excessive subsidence that begins over land such that aerosol transported by the easterly jet reaches a strip of complex terrain and is forced downward; a similar behavior can be found in the MERRA‐2 reanalysis. This excessive subsidence has been somewhat reduced by improved parameterizations found in recent versions of the GEOS model. However, any replay constrained by MERRA‐2 meteorology, even those based on recent versions of GEOS, suffer from the same excessive subsidence. An additional set of simulations in which the GEOS model was free‐running was used to quantify the role of aerosol itself in adjusting the profile of vertical motion. While self‐lofting of biomass burning aerosol reduces the subsidence over the ocean, the magnitude of its impact is only a fraction of the bias in MERRA‐2.

  PublisherDOI

• A New Realization of the Terrestrial Reference Frame: Combining GPS, SLR and VLBI at the Observation Level from 2010–2022

  2024-03-09

  preprintOpen access

  We describe the development and assessment of a new terrestrial reference frame (TRF) based on combining GPS, SLR and VLBI at the observation level over the period 2010–2022. Included in the solution, in addition to station coordinates and precise orbit solutions for all participating satellites, are Earth orientation parameters (EOP) and low-degree zonal coefficients (J2 and J3) of the geopotential. The overall solution concept grew from earlier efforts to realize a TRF using GPS data alone, capitalizing on GPS receivers on the ground and in low-Earth orbit (LEO). Here we add observations from both the SLR and VLBI techniques, which provide the foundation for traditional realizations of the TRF.In linking the GPS and SLR techniques, our approach dispenses with traditional ground survey ties, relying exclusively on space ties from the GRACE and Jason LEO missions. In addition to SLR from these satellites, we include observations from the dedicated LAGEOS satellites, which prove particularly important for recovering low-degree gravity. A major evolution of our approach is the addition of VLBI at the observation level. Lacking a robust tie in Earth orbit for VLBI observations, we apply as constraints the published ground survey ties to nearby GPS stations, enforcing inclusion of the corresponding tracking data in the solutions. The VLBI effort is in the exploratory phase, and further tuning of the strategy is needed to better exploit collocations with both GPS and SLR. About 40% of the participating solution arcs (spanning 2010–2022) now include VLBI and support accurate recovery of UT1 as part of the EOP solution.Though the resulting TRF solution is based on only 12.6 years of data, it is competitive with ITRF2020 in terms of fundamental frame parameters (origin and scale) and their temporal evolution, both linear and seasonal. The relative rates of origin (3D) and scale (at Earth's surface) are 0.2 mm yr-1 and 0.1 mm yr-1 respectively. Absolute scale (at epoch 2015.0) and 3D origin both differ by 2 mm. One advantage of our technique is that precise orbit solutions for both GRACE and Jason missions, defined in the realized TRF, are byproducts of the overall solution. We use the Jason orbit solutions to characterize the impact of contemporary TRF errors on sea level variations (both global and regional) and discuss the implications of these results.

  PublisherDOI

• GRACE and GRACE-FO Level-1 V04 Data Processing Status

  2024-09-23

  preprintOpen access

  The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO), launched in May 2018, provides invaluable information about mass change in the Earth system, continuing the legacy of GRACE. Fundamental requirements for successful mass change recovery are precise orbit determination and inter-satellite ranging, determination of the relative clock alignment of the ultra-stable oscillators (USOs), precise attitude determination, and accelerometry. NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the official Level-1 data processing and analysis center and provides weekly Level-1A/B data updates. Here we present analysis of the aforementioned GRACE-FO sensor data, updates to the accelerometer transplant calibrations, as the basis for Level-2 release RL06.3, and a discussion of the overall GRACE-FO measurement system performance in light of an increasing Solar cycle 25. We also provide an update on current GRACE/GRACE-FO reprocessing efforts toward a future unified Release-07 data record. The research presented in this abstract has been carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. ©2024 California Institute of Technology. Government sponsorship acknowledged.

  PublisherDOI

• Recovering Differential Forces From the GRACE‐D Accelerometer

  Earth and Space Science · 2024-04-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The reduction of non‐gravitational accelerations through an onboard accelerometer is a vital part of accurately estimating gravity fields for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) Follow‐On (GRACE‐FO). Current accelerometer quality, specifically a defect on the GRACE‐D accelerometer, necessitates the use of extensive calibration techniques to optimally utilize the accelerometer measurements. This paper describes these techniques and correction algorithms as they are used for the official GRACE‐FO accelerometer products, which rest on the information present in the partially functional GRACE‐D accelerometer. First, transplanted data from GRACE‐C is used to remove common effects between the spacecraft. Then, GRACE‐D data is utilized to compute a correction to the transplanted data to account for solar radiation pressure (SRP) and albedo using a parity argument and to account for non‐common drag and thruster leaks in the attitude control system. The SRP and albedo term predominantly improves C 3,0 while the drag and leaky thruster term improves the gravity field across the entire spectrum. Finally, some comments on alternative data usage, initial modifications to the algorithms to account for other spacecraft operational modes, and future outlook are provided.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Summertime Marine Boundary Layer Cloud, Thermodynamic, and Drizzle Morphology over the Eastern North Atlantic: A Four-Year Study

  Journal of Climate · 2022-03-22 · 17 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Summertime remote sensor and in situ data from 2016 to 2019 collected at the ARM Eastern North Atlantic (ENA) Observatory are combined with aircraft measurements from the Aerosol and Cloud Experiments in the Eastern North Atlantic (ACE-ENA) campaign to quantify marine boundary layer (MBL) cloud, thermodynamic, and drizzle morphology in the region. A radar reflectivity–rainfall rate relationship ( Z – R ) is developed from aircraft data and 6-h cloud morphological regimes are identified from ENA data using a k -means algorithm driven by three independent inputs quantifying cloud thickness, drizzle intensity, and cloud field geometric complexity. Four separate MBL structural regimes representing non- or weakly drizzling single-layer stratocumulus, drizzling stratocumulus and cumulus-coupled stratocumulus, deep convection, and broken clouds embedded in northerly flow are identified. Single-layer stratocumulus is indicated when weak subtropical anticyclones are significantly west of the ENA site, and the MBL is cooler and drier than when drizzling and cumulus-coupled stratocumulus and broken clouds are observed. Drizzling and cumulus-coupled stratocumulus clouds are observed on the eastern flank of strong subtropical anticyclones in deep warm moist air masses with wind speeds exceeding 7 m s −1 and strong near-surface wind shear. Broken clouds exhibit strong wind shear near the inversion, while single-layer stratocumulus clouds have lower wind speeds and minimal shear. Net latent heat fluxes in the subcloud layer resulting from a combination of the ocean surface heat flux and evaporating drizzle average near zero over long periods in drizzling and cumulus-coupled stratocumulus. The ECMWF reanalysis version 5 (ERA5) is found to accurately represent single-layer stratocumulus properties, while producing significant discrepancies when drizzling stratocumulus and cumulus-coupled stratocumulus are observed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• B. N. Holben

  175 shared

• J. A. Ogren

  175 shared

• David J. Diner

  Jet Propulsion Laboratory

  172 shared

• Robert J. Charlson

  University of Washington

  172 shared

• Ralph A. Kahn

  Goddard Space Flight Center

  172 shared

• Robert T. Menzies

  172 shared

• C. A. Hostetler

  National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  124 shared

• Graeme L. Stephens

  124 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Meteorology

  Pennsylvania State University

  1994