PrintMy name is William Brune. I am a distinguished professor of meteorology and have been a faculty member at Penn State for 35 years.
The atmosphere creates and sustains life. It's amazing and it's important to know how it works. I love teaching this course because it contains all the essential elements of the science behind the weather. I have been fascinated by the weather ever since I was a little kid, sitting on the curb in front of my house in Houston, Texas, watching the huge thunderstorms build and build and build until you knew the rain was coming soon and heavy. Usually I got inside before I got soaked, but not always! As a physics graduate student, I tried to focus on astrophysics, but I knew I loved studying the atmosphere the most because it is so complex and so relevant to our lives, so as soon as I could, I returned to studying and teaching about the atmosphere here at Penn State. I have taught Meteo 300 in residence four times, three in the past five years.
My research specialty is atmospheric chemistry, but to understand the chemistry, you need to understand the atmosphere and all of its physics. My research group consists of graduate students, research associates who have Ph.D.s, engineers, and undergraduates - sometimes even sophomores. We have participated in more than 40 field studies of the atmosphere using both towers on the ground and airplanes. We have studied the atmosphere in places as far north as northern Sweden and as far south as New Zealand, and many places in between. We have done tower-based studies in several cities, including New York City, Houston, and Mexico City, and in forests, including the California Sierra Nevadas and rural Alabama. On aircraft, we have flown all over the Pacific Ocean, North America, and the northern Atlantic Ocean. In 2012, we were part of the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry study and spent our time flying around thunderstorms in the central United States. That was fun! The aircraft encountered lightning while flying through anvil clouds of thunderstorms and we were able to measure the changes in atmospheric composition caused by lightning and weaker electrical discharges. Now we chase thunderstorms looking for weak corona electrical discharges that form on the tops of trees under thunderstorms.
