GLOBAL PARTNERS
Predicting Unpredictable Weather Mason Engineering PhD student Leonardo Porcacchia remembers watching the news when he was growing up in Italy and seeing reports about weather hazards. He says the scenes and stories from his youth drove him to become a scientist of the atmosphere with a focus on precipitation. Extreme weather events represent a serious problem everywhere in the world, particularly in remote regions that are not well equipped with instruments to predict these events and prepare for them. Porcacchia’s research focuses on a peculiar precipitation process in the atmosphere, a process responsible for high-intensity rainfall rates at ground level. “The process, called collision-coalescence, is like the snowball effect, except with raindrops. It works like this: Some drops in the cloud reach the point where they start to fall toward the Assistant Professor Viviana Maggioni and her research team analyze satellite data to improve the characterization of precipitation around the globe. Photo by Evan Cantwell
20 | MASON ENGINEERING ANNUAL REPORT 2018
