Research and Teaching Interests
Dr. Leila M. Véspoli de Carvalho
My academic education includes B.S., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Atmospheric Sciences.
I started my academic career in 1988 hired as a tenure track lecturer and researcher at the
Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Sao Paulo (DAC/USP), Brazil, two years
after finishing my Bachelor of Sciences degree. I was part of the 7th graduation class from a
relatively new department established in the mid 1970s at the University of Sao Paulo. At that
time, the faculty was composed of young professors, mostly mathematicians and physicists who
obtained their Ph.D. degrees in the United States, Canada and England. As part of this
enthusiastic faculty, I had the priviledge and challenge to build what today is considered the best
Program in Atmospheric Sciences in Latin-America. The Department presently has 162
undergraduate and 74 graduate students (36 Ph.D. and 38 M.Sc.), with an increasing fraction of
them coming from several countries in Latin-America, Europe and Africa.
Over the years, my teaching experience has included courses such as climate dynamics,
statistical methods applied to climatology, regional climate, physical meteorology, atmospheric
radiation, and satellite meteorology. In addition to my teaching obligations, I started my research
career in remote sensing and regional meteorology. I finished my M.Sc. degree in 1993 and
Ph.D. in 1998, when I became Assistant Professor in the same department. The focus of my
M.Sc. thesis was on mesoscale meteorology with radar and satellite precipitation analysis. The
focus of my Ph.D. thesis was on satellite cloud classification and scaling properties of mesoscale
convective systems.
In the last nine years, I have expanded my research interests and education projects to
contribute to important new goals within the Department of Atmospheric Sciences in Sao Paulo.
I strongly believe that integration of research and advising of undergraduate and graduate
students is essential for the development of a strong and internationally recognized program in
Climate Sciences. The new research topics have been developed as collaborative projects with
institutions in Brazil and abroad, such as the University of California Santa Barbara, CIRESNOAA in Boulder Colorado, University of Maryland, NASA, University of Milwaukee,
University of Stockholm and University of Buenos Aires. I spent two years as a visiting
researcher in ICESS at UCSB (2000-2002), and since then I have been collaborating as a Co-PI
in several research projects related to Climate Dynamics. I became a United States Permanent
Resident in July 2005. In the following, I briefly describe my academic projects including
students involvement (four Ph.D. and three M.Sc.). Additional details can be seen in the attached
C.V.
My current research interests can be broadly classified into the areas of regional and
large-scale climate variability and modeling, global climate change and scaling processes in
geophysics. On large and regional scales, I have been interested in climate variability and
numerical modeling of the monsoon system in South America, atmospheric variations on
intraseasonal to interannual time-scales and occurrences of extreme events of precipitation and
temperature. Two of my Ph.D. students and one M.Sc. student are developing diagnostic and
prognostic analyses of the summer monsoon over South America, including statistical climate
forecasts of extreme precipitation and temperature and impacts on vegetation. In addition, we are
investigating dynamical processes related to variations in the onset and duration of the rainy
season, and their relationships with tropical-extratropical teleconnections on several time-scales.
Moreover, one important focus of our research is on understanding and predicting active and
break phases of the monsoon and relationships with tropical disturbances on intraseasonal timescales. The frequency and intensity of these events are very important for hazards assessment in
urban and rural areas as well as for endangered ecosystems such as the Brazilian Savanna. As a
participating scientist in the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in the Amazon
(LBA), I have been increasingly involved in interdisciplinary projects aiming to understand
complex relationships among biophysical, hydrological and atmospheric processes in the
Amazon and in the Brazilian Savanna. One contribution was the development of a satellite
tracking technique of mesoscale convective systems, which allows detailed classification and
analysis over the Amazon. The method has been successfully used by different groups in Spain,
USA, and Costa Rica since 2001.
More recently, my students and I have started to investigate mesoscale processes over the
Amazon and southeastern Brazil using the Brazilian version of the Regional Atmospheric
Modeling System (BRAMS). RAMS, originally developed at Colorado State University (CSU),
is a state-of-the-art, multipurpose, numerical prediction model designed to simulate atmospheric
circulations from hemispheric scales down to large eddy simulations of the planetary boundary
layer. BRAMS is a joint project between CSU and several universities and research institutions
in Brazil, with a strong participation of professors and students from the University of Sao Paulo.
My students and I are also actively investigating the Antarctic climate and its variations
on intraseasonal to interannual time-scales. The response of Antarctica to global warming does
not appear to be uniform and possible feedbacks are still largely unknown. In this regard, my
students (2 M.Sc. and 2 Ph.D.) and I investigate dynamical forcings of extremes in temperature
and sea ice extent in the ocean-continent interface, where interactions with climate systems and
biophysical processes are very complex. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of tropicalextratropical teleconnections and relationships with the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode and
storm tracks on the subtropics of South America. Great effort has been made in understanding
the dynamical relationships between tropical activity on intraseasonal time-scales and the
dynamics of the lower extratropical stratosphere and total ozone changes in Antarctica. In this
context, one important new focus of our research is on the investigation of regional processes in
the Antarctica Peninsula in response to atmospheric forcings on intraseasonal time-scales. For
this purpose, we are performing simulations with BRAMS model to study the relative roles of
topographic and sea surface temperature forcings for the large variability in temperature and
atmospheric circulation observed east and west of the Antarctica Peninsula. Moreover,
simulations of mesoscale processes in ice covered regions in high latitudes with BRAMS are of
significant impact for regional modeling and climate change.
In the context of global climate change, we have analyzed Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) Coupled Global Climate Models simulations to investigate impacts of
global warming in the characteristics of the monsoons. This study is part of one M.Sc. student
project. In addition, we are interested in the dynamics of atmospheric circulation and temperature
fluctuations and their interactions with other components of the climate system. Understanding
the natural variability of the climate system is crucial to predict nonlinear climate forcings and
abrupt changes possibly due to anthropogenic activity. Recently, we have investigated decadal
variations in temperature anomalies in the present climate and from reconstructed paleoclimatic
temperature records using nonlinear approaches and scaling coefficients.
In the last 5 years, I have made a significant effort in preparing course materials on
satellite meteorology and climate sciences, which include many interactive exercises,
PowerPoint presentations, computer programs, and access to weather products (e.g., global
monitoring of extreme precipitation). The material is publicly available in my web site Group for
Studies of Multi-scale Processes (GEM - www.iag.usp.br/meteo/gem). They are used by
undergraduate and graduate students. In the climate sciences course, the focus is on the
application of statistics to practical exercises in climate studies and weather forecasts. Exercises
are designed to encourage students to apply theoretical concepts to real data analysis problems.
In the satellite meteorology course, there is a diverse set of lectures with many examples of
applications for the Northern and Southern Hemispheres on different spatiotemporal scales. The
web site also shows important links to other web sites on climate and weather, including data
sites. Students from Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries have acknowledged the free
access and usefulness of the course material. In the future, I intend to translate the material to
English language, which will have a much broader audience. In addition, I have had an
increasing number of graduate students from the Department of Geography at the University of
Sao Paulo attending my course on statistical methods applied to regional and large-scale climate
analysis.
In the last five years I have participated in several thesis, dissertations and qualifying
exam committees in distinct departments and institutions in Brazil and two tenure committees in
Argentina. As a faculty member of DAC/USP, I have been assigned many department committee
services.