Global Hawk preparing to
fly over hurricanes 2012

S-PolKa Radar in
the Maldives 2012

Pakistan Flood Study 2011

Houze's Book


Houze receives Rossby
Medal

TRMM satellite

  Mountain Wave Cloud
in the Alps

NOAA Hurricane Hunter

Flying in the eye
of Katrina 2005 

Professor Houze received his B.S. in Meteorology from Texas A&M University in 1967. He received his Master's and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington in 1972. 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. In 2006 he was Thompson Lecturer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He has published about 200 research articles and has written a graduate textbook entitled Cloud Dynamics. In 1982, Professor Houze was awarded both the American Meteorological Society's Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award for his research and the Society's Editor's award for his reviews of papers for the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. In 1984, he was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. In 1989 he won the NOAA Environmental Research Laboratories' Distinguished Author's Award. In 2002, he was designated as a “Highly Cited Researcher” by the Institute of Scientific Information (h-index 54). In 2006, Professor Houze received the American Meteorological Society's Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, which is the highest honor that the Society can bestow on an atmospheric scientist. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and he delivered the Bjerknes Memorial Lecture at the American Geophysical Union's 2012 annual meeting. In 2013 he will be inducted as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his fundamental research on cloud dynamics.

At the UW Professor Houze teaches classes on cloud physics and dynamics, thermodynamics, and general meteorology. His research interests are mesoscale meteorology, radar meteorology, tropical meteorology, precipitation processes, cloud dynamics, cloud microphysics, and storm dynamics.

Professor Houze leads a research team at the UW 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. These projects have been sponsored by NSF, NASA, DOE, and NOAA. His approach integrates observations, models, and theory. He has specialized in weather over the tropical oceans, over major mountain ranges and monsoons.

In 1974 he took part in the historic GATE project. There he collected groundbreaking data on tropical squall lines. In 1978 he led a radar experiment to study clouds in the winter monsoon over Malaysia as part of the international Monsoon Experiment (MONEX). In 1987, he investigated the convection over the ocean north of Australia with airborne radar data in the Equatorial Mesoscale Experiment (EMEX). In 1992-1993 he participated in the tropical western Pacific TOGA COARE experiment operationg out of the Solomon Islands. From October 2011-January 2012, he led a radar experiment on Addu Atoll in the Maldives  as part of the Dynamics of the MJO (DYNAMO) and DOE ARM MJO Experiment (AMIE).

Another area of Professor Houze's research foci is understanding how mountains influence precipitating cloud systems.In the 1970s and 80s he studied fronts passing over the Cascade Mountains in Washington. in 1999, he was a leader of a the Mesoscale Alpine Programme, in which he investigated the storms that produce heavy rains and floods in the Alps. In 2001 he returned to the Cascades in a project called IMPROVE II, which studied winter storms passing over the Oregon Cascades.

Professor Houze and his group have participated in several studies of the airborne radar data collected in research flights through hurricanes. In 2005, his Hurricane Rainband and Intensity Change Experiment (RAINEX) directed flights into Hurricanes Katrina, Ophelia, and Rita. He was interviewed by NPR and the BBC about results of his RAINEX study of Hurricane Rita. Results of this study were published in Science Magazine in March 2007. In September 2012, his group participated in NASA's Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) program, which conducted flights of the NASA Global Hawk aircraft over Hurricane Nadine and other storm. This project is historic as a transition to hurricane research using autonomous (unmanned) aircraft. The Global Hawk flies at 55,000-60,000 feet, over the tops of storms and drops soundings and makes remote measurements of the storms as directed by pilots and scientists on the ground.

Professor Houze has also worked for many years on satellite radar observations of tropical cloud systems. Since 1985, he has served on the Science Team for the U.S. (NASA)-Japan (NASDA) Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Satellite (TRMM). This unique satellite (pictured above 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 is now also on the NASA Science Team for CloudSat, another satellite that uses a radar to study clouds. Using these satellites he and his group have studied large and small cloud systems over all of the tropics. These studies have focused on the nature of raining cloud systems over both the oceans and land masses of the tropics, and on how the Himalayan and Andes mountain ranges affect the nature of the convective cloud systems that occur at low latitudes. Recently, these studies have focused on floods in India and Pakistan, as described in a 2011 cover story of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

When Professor Houze is not teaching and doing research in meteorology he trains dogs (see his German Shepherd Minnie) and works on his house (click here to see what the Seattle Easter 1997 Windstorm did to Professor Houze's house).