Zacharay "Zac" Lawrence is a CIRES post doc who joined PSL's Attribution and Predictability Assessments Team in September 2019. He recently graduated with a Ph.D. in atmospheric physics from New Mexico Tech, where he also received a B.S. in physics.

Zac is primarily working with PSL scientist Judith Perlwitz and collaborators within NOAA and NCAR to evaluate representation of the stratosphere and stratospheretroposphere coupling in subseasonalto-seasonal (S2S) models. He is documenting stratospheric biases in S2S forecast models and assessing their representation in a number of atmospheric processes. The goal is ultimately to determine the sources of such biases and deficiencies, and impacts on forecast skill to help improve the models. A particular focus will be on NOAA’s new and upcoming FV3-based GFS ensemble model. It is hoped that what is learned can be used to guide and improve the future Unified Forecast System (UFS).

In his spare time, Zac enjoys powerlifting, playing music (especially blues and bluegrass), tabletop gaming, and gardening (especially growing garlic and hot peppers).

Posted: Feburary 27, 2020