Mohammed Osman, Postdoc (CIMMS/NSSL)

Background:
Ph.D., Atmospheric Physics, University of Western Ontario, Canada (2012)
M.Sc., Solar Energy & Environmental Physics, Ben-Gurion University, Israel (2007)
M.Sc., Physics, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia (2005)
B.Sc., Physics, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia (2000)

Experience:
Mohammed Osman was born and raised in southern Ethiopia. Having grown up in a country with 84 tribes, 84 spoken languages (70 of them are local languages), he jokes that he is only fluent in two! He attended Addis Ababa University, where he earned his bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in physics. He then made the move to Israel, where he studied at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and eventually relocated to Ontario Canada, where he earned his Ph.D. in atmospheric physics. He worked for several years in the Air Quality Research Division at Environment and Climate Change Canada in Toronto before coming to Oklahoma to join OU CIMMS.

What He Does:
Mohammed has been a postdoc with OU CIMMS and NSSL since April 2016. He is working on mining a unique large ARM (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement) LIDAR data sets to study turbulence in the convective boundary layer. Computing vertical profiles of turbulent fluctuations of water vapor, temperature as well as wind and relating these profiles with large-scale variables predicted by numerical models is the focus of his research. Small noise errors in LIDAR measurements enable us to derive up to fourth-order moments (i.e., variance, skewness, kurtosis) for water vapor, temperature, and wind fluctuations. Furthermore, such a continuous, long-term, and vertically resolved LIDAR observations provide an ideal situation for a detailed climatology study of the above parameters. Since the resulting moments don’t depend on a priori data, it provides independent information and insight that can be used for both weather forecasts as well as climate models.

Trivia:
Mohammed enjoys spending time with his wife, traveling, cooking, and drinking coffee, and enjoying lively conversation (Did you know that coffee actually originated in Ethiopia?). He also likes watching soccer, basketball, and American football, and is a long-distance runner.