About Me:
My name is Randy Chase, a Research Scientist working at CSU/CIRA. I grew up in Buffalo, New York where lake effect snow likely inspired my love of the weather. For my undergraduate degree I attended SUNY Brockport and had my first research experience at an REU hosted by Penn State where I worked with Dr. Jose Fuentes on ozone transport caused by convection in the Amazon Rainforest. After undergrad, I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I got my M.S. and Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences working with Dr. Stephen Nesbitt and Dr. Greg McFarquhar. My graduate research focused on radar remote sensing of snow, where I investigated why the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission’s snowfall retrievals were deficient, provided an alternative retrieval method and evaluated the new retrieval against CloudSat. After my Ph.D. I did a two year postdoc with Dr. Amy McGovern at the University of Oklahoma as part of the NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography (AI2ES). During my postdoc I was first tasked to write two plain language machine learning tutorials for meteorologists. Beyond the tutorials, I also investigated if machine learning could help us retrieve storm updrafts from ground based radar data alone. My role at CSU/CIRA, is to assist in two major projects: INvestigation of Convective UpdraftS (INCUS) and Satellite-based 3D global cloud field analysis (OVERCAST). I will leverage my expertise in radar remote sensing and machine learning to assist the projects in their respective goals.