Professor Robert A. Houze, Jr.
Texas A&M University and received
a degree in Meteorology in 1967. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
joined the faculty of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington in 1972.
He was promoted to full Professor of Atmospheric Sciences in 1982. In 1988-89
he was Guest Professor in the Laboratory of Atmospheric Physics at the
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Zürich. In 1996 he was Houghton Lecturer at the Center for Meteorology
and Physical Oceanography at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His research interests are mesoscale meteorology, radar meteorology,
precipitation climatology, cloud dynamics, cloud microphysics, and storm
dynamics. At the UW, he leads a research team called the Mesoscale Group. He
and his group have participated in many international field projects employing
weather radar and aircraft in the tropics and midlatitudes. Professor
Houze's approach integrates observations, models, and theory, utilizing data
sets from both the tropics and midlatitudes. In 1999 he took part in projects
to study tropical precipitation at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands
(the Kwajalein Experiment)
and to study storms producing heavy rains and floods in the Alps in
northern Italy (the Mesoscale Alpine Programme).
In 2001 he participated in a project called IMPROVE II, which studied
winter storms over the Oregon Cascades. From 1985-present, Professor Houze
has served on the International Science Team for the U.S. (NASA) -Japan
(NASDA) Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Satellite (TRMM). This unique satellite (pictured
left, click to enlarge) launched in 1997 orbits over the tropics with a radar
and other instruments on board to map rainfall over the tropics.
He teaches classes on cloud physics,
cloud dynamics,
and general meteorology.
He has published 151 research articles and has written a graduate textbook
entitled Cloud
Dynamics. Professor Houze won the Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award
and the Editor's Award from the American
Meteorological Society in 1982. In 1989 he won the Distinguished
Author's Award from NOAA. Professor Houze is a Fellow of the American
Meteorological Society.
When Professor Houze is not teaching and doing research in meteorology he trains his German Shepherd Jasper and works on his house (click here to see what the Seattle Easter 1997 Windstorm did to Professor Houze's house).
The following vita is in pdf format. If you are using Netscape or Explorer, the file will automatically load for you for viewing and printing if you have installed Acrobat Reader as a plug-in. If needed, you can download Acrobat Reader for free here.
Professor Houze's vita
For links to pdfs of individual papers, refer to the Mesoscale Group's
publications
list.
Professor Houze's Cloud Atlas