Houze's Book

 

Houze receives
Rossby Medal

Hurricane Hunter

Flying in the eye
of Katrina

TRMM satellite

  Mountain Wave Cloud
in Alps

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 52). 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.

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. Professor Houze's approach integrates observations, models, and theory, and utilizes data sets collected in 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 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. He is also on the Science Team for the Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Program. In 2005, Professor Houze was a leader of the Hurricane Rainband and Intensity Change Experiment (RAINEX) in which he co-directed flights of aircraft 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.

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).