Robert Wood
· Professor of Atmospheric SciencesUniversity of Washington · Atmospheric Sciences
Active 1900–2025
Academic metrics are sourced from OpenAlex and public funding records; values may differ from Google Scholar.
About
The faculty, staff and students in the Department of Atmospheric and Climate Science at the University of Washington are engaged in the study of a broad range of atmospheric phenomena and processes, using methods ranging from mathematical analysis to field experimentation. Research projects range in size from small studies involving individual scientists to large national and international programs involving teams of scientists. Research groups in the department are concerned with Atmospheric Chemistry, Atmospheric Dynamics, Boundary Layer Processes, Cloud and Aerosol Research, Glaciology and Planetary Atmospheres, Cloud Dynamics, Precipitation Processes, Storms, Weather Analysis and Forecasting, Climate, Global change, Airflow over mountains, and other topics. Some groups maintain special research facilities for the use of their students. In some of these activities, there is close cooperation with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Oregon State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Regional Center through the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies. Faculty members often have interests in more than one area, and research projects frequently involve questions of broad scope which do not fall neatly into a single category. This is particularly true of research projects directed toward understanding the chemical and physical modification of the environment by human activities.
Research topics
- Environmental science
- Atmospheric sciences
- Climatology
- Geology
- Meteorology
- Geography
- Oceanography
- Physics
- Chemistry
- Agronomy
Selected publications
Atmospheric chemistry and physics · 2021 · 313 citations
Abstract. Southern Africa produces almost a third of the Earth's biomass burning (BB) aerosol particles, yet the fate of these particles and their influence on regional and global climate is poorly understood. ORACLES (ObseRvations of Aerosols above CLouds and their intEractionS) is a 5-year NASA EVS-2 (Earth Venture Suborbital-2) investigation with three intensive observation periods designed to study key atmospheric processes that determine the climate impacts of these aerosols. During the Sou…
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society · 2020 · 311 citations
Abstract Weather and climate models are challenged by uncertainties and biases in simulating Southern Ocean (SO) radiative fluxes that trace to a poor understanding of cloud, aerosol, precipitation, and radiative processes, and their interactions. Projects between 2016 and 2018 used in situ probes, radar, lidar, and other instruments to make comprehensive measurements of thermodynamics, surface radiation, cloud, precipitation, aerosol, cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), and ice nucleating particle…
The hemispheric contrast in cloud microphysical properties constrains aerosol forcing
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 172 citations
The robustness of this constraint depends upon the assumption that pristine Southern Ocean droplet number concentration is a suitable proxy for preindustrial concentrations. Droplet number concentrations calculated from satellite data over the Southern Ocean are high in austral summer. Near Antarctica, they reach values typical of Northern Hemisphere polluted outflows. These concentrations are found to agree with several in situ datasets. In contrast, climate models show systematic underpredicti…
Opportunistic experiments to constrain aerosol effective radiative forcing
Atmospheric chemistry and physics · 2022 · 139 citations
Aerosol-cloud interactions (ACIs) are considered to be the most uncertain driver of present-day radiative forcing due to human activities. The nonlinearity of cloud-state changes to aerosol perturbations make it challenging to attribute causality in observed relationships of aerosol radiative forcing. Using correlations to infer causality can be challenging when meteorological variability also drives both aerosol and cloud changes independently. Natural and anthropogenic aerosol perturbations fr…
Atmospheric chemistry and physics · 2020 · 106 citations
Abstract. In the southeast Atlantic, well-defined smoke plumes from Africa advect over marine boundary layer cloud decks; both are most extensive around September, when most of the smoke resides in the free troposphere. A framework is put forth for evaluating the performance of a range of global and regional atmospheric composition models against observations made during the NASA ORACLES (ObseRvations of Aerosols above CLouds and their intEractionS) airborne mission in September 2016. A strength…
Recent grants
NSF · $841k · 2008–2012
NSF · $1.1M · 2017–2021
NSF · $578k · 2010–2015
Frequent coauthors
- 148 shared
Paquita Zuidema
- 135 shared
Christopher S. Bretherton
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
- 130 shared
Isabel L. McCoy
- 103 shared
J. Redemann
University of Oklahoma
- 82 shared
Paola Formenti
Université Paris Cité
- 81 shared
Craig Gralley
Defense Intelligence Agency
- 81 shared
Marion Priest
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
- 81 shared
Isabelle Thabault
Ministry of Security and Justice
Labs
Department of Atmospheric and Climate SciencePI
Awards & honors
- The 2001 L. F. Richardson Prize, Royal Meteorological Societ…
- Editors’ Citation for Excellence in Refereeing for Journal o…
- University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences…
- The 2011 Henry G Houghton Award, American Meteorological Soc…
Similar researchers at University of Washington
- Resume-aware match score
- Save to shortlist
- AI-drafted outreach
See your match with Robert Wood
PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.
- Free to start
- No credit card
- 30-second signup