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E-mail Dr. Carleton:carleton@essc.psu.edu
My expertise is in climatology and satellite remote sensing. These are parts of physical geography, which is the study of the Earth's physical environment and the processes responsible for its variations over space. Within the field of climatology, there are also many sub-fields, differentiated by topic and also scale. My particular areas of climatology research are synoptic and dynamic climatology (macro-scale), climate variations (climate dynamics), and the impacts of human activities on climate (climate impacts).
Geography 110, "Climates of the World", is an introduction to climatology, including principal processes of the global climatic system and their variation over space and time.
Geography 437, "Satellite Climatology", is a discussion of the application of satellite data to current and planned large-scale climate experiments.
Geography 433W, "Introduction to Global Climatic Systems", covers global atmospheric circulation, including tropical, midlatitude and polar subsystems; ocean, land, cryospheric and urban climatic systems and interactions.
Geography 503 (.pdf file), "Seminar in Climatology", Selected topics in climatology, emphasizing global-scale and man-climate interactions; individual and group projects.
Physical Geography at Penn State
Graduate Students Supervised (past 5 years):
Mr. Jimmy Adegoke (Ph.D. September 1999, postdoctoral scholar, Sept. 1999-May 2000): "Warm Season Land Surface: Climate Interactions in the U.S. Midwest."
Mr. Jason Allard (M.S., Penn State, 1997, Ph.D. August 2000): "Impacts of Recent and Contemporary Land Surface Changes on Climate in the U.S. Midwest". (M.S., "The Climatic Impacts of Jet Airplane Condensation Trails (Contrails) in the Northeast U.S." Surface station climate data (primarily cloudiness, temperatures) in the Northeast show evidence of jet contrail effects in the period before and after about 1960, using two separate statistical methods.
Dr. David Travis (Ph.D., Indiana, 1994; currently Assistant Professor of Geography, University of Wisconsin- Whitewater): "Jet Aircraft Condensation Trails: Their Radiative Impacts and Association with Atmospheric Conditions". This research showed that "outbreaks" of contrails are determined by meteorological factors (primarily vertical wind shear, humidity and temperature), and can be predicted reliably using logit modeling.
Dr. David Arnold (Ph.D., Indiana, 1994; currently Assistant Professor of Geography, Ball State University): "Synoptic and Mesoscale Climatologies of Severe Local Storms for the American Midwest". This study demonstrated that upper-tropospheric map parameters and vertical atmospheric thermodynamics influence the development of classes of severe weather in the Midwest.
Ms. Melanie Roy (M.A., Indiana, 1996; currently school teacher in Winchester, England, U.K.): "A Satellite Climatology of Tropical Cyclones in the Northern Hemisphere Tropical Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, 1987-1990". Satellite-based classification of the cloud vortices associated with tropical cyclones provides a spatial climatology of these systems that shows associations with ENSO, sea surface temperatures and other climate parameters.
Mr. Yudong Song (Ph.D., December 1999; currently at Software Technology Division of Hughes Network Systems, Maryland): "Characteristics and Prediction of Southern Ocean Mesoscale Cyclogenesis Using Satellite Passive Microwave Data". Satellite microwave radiometry provides information on the structure and development of mesoscale storms over the southern oceans, that can be used in a multivariate statistical model to predict this scale of cyclogenesis.
Carleton, A.M. 1999. Methodology in climatology. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 (in press).
Carleton, A.M., John, G., and Welsh, R. 1998. Interannual variations and regionality of Antarctic sea ice - temperature associations. Annals of Glaciology, 27: 403-408.
Carleton, A.M. 1998. Ocean-atmosphere interactions, In: Myers, R.A. (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Environmental Analysis and Remediation. John Wiley and Sons, Inc., New York.: pp. 3151-3188.
Carleton, A.M. and Song, Y. 1997. Synoptic climatology, and intrahemispheric associations, of cold air mesocyclones in the Australasian sector. Journal of Geophysical Research, 102: 13,873-13,887.
Song, Y. and Carleton, A.M. 1997. Climatological "models" of cold air mesocyclones derived from SSM/I data. Geocarto International, 12: 79-89.
Travis, D.J., Carleton, A.M. and Changnon, S.A. 1997. An empirical model to predict widespread occurrences of contrails. Journal of Applied Meteorology, 36: 1211-1220.