About
Hello! My name is Randy Chase, and I am a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) located at Colorado State University (CSU). I work 100% remotely for CIRA from Salt Lake City where my partner and I live.
TL;DR: I got interested in weather at a young age from movies (e.g., twister) and lake effect snow. I got my B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. all in Atmospheric Sciences/Meteorology. My main research interests lie in using the latest machine learning methods for enhancing weather forecasting. You will often find me chasing storms, playing tennis, or cheering on the Fighting Illini and the Buffalo Bills.
My Journey
Weather Interests
Many in the weather enterprise have a story for how they got into weather, a origin story of sorts. I can remember my weather interests dating back to elementry school. I grew up in Western New York (i.e., Buffalo, go Bills) where lake effect snow is part of the local culture. Annually, the city gets near 100” of snow, but where my family lives it was more inline of 60”. My family were avid snowmobilers, enjoying the perks of having persistent fresh snowfall downwind of the Great Lakes. I think this exposure to intense and frequent snowfall inspired some of my inital interest in the weather.
My interest in the weather also stems from some movies/tv shows I watched at a young age. I vividly remember watching Twister on our surround sound system with the cow mooing around the room. Another movie I enjoyed was The Day After Tomorrow (despite its inaccuracies; “the air is sinking so fast it doesn’t warm”… ). Lastly a TV-show I remember was the Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers show.
Cumulatively, my curriosity for weather arose from these many factors. I was not bashful of this interest. In elementary school, before we left for middle school, we could paint one of the cinderblocks in the hallway. Mine had a tornado on it. In highschool, one of my nicknames were ‘doppler’ (and why my many of my social media handles are dopplerchase).
Education
I began my formal study of the weather in 2012, at the State University of New York (SUNY) Brockport. Brockport is a small liberal arts college located in Brockport NY, a small town located on the Erie Canal. I chose Brockport because of the proximity to my home town and the small personal class sizes (e.g., 20 students total) for Meteorology classes. Brockport was a great place to get a solid base understanding of the atmosphere. I double majored in Meteorology and Water Resources with the inital intent to become a forecaster, but after an REU in 2014 at Penn State, I quickly realized I enjoyed research.
After Brockport I went on to do a Masters and PhD at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign working under the advisement of Dr. Greg McFarquhar and Dr. Stephen Nesbitt. My graduate work was generally focused on radar remote sensing of snowfall, where I explored multi-frequency radar data and worked on an alternative retrieval of snowfall for the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission’s Dual-Frequency Precipitation Radar. After my PhD, I explored the world of AI/ML for atmospheric sciences and did a Postdoc with Dr. Amy McGovern at the Unviersity of Oklahoma and the NSF funded AI institute named AI2ES. See more details about these research topics on my past-research page.
Other
Some other things to know about me are: I am a HUGE Illini and Bills fan. So if you see me out and about, I will often be wearing something Illini or Bills related.