| 
- Email:
- Louis.Wicker@noaa.gov
- Phone:
- 405-325-6340
- Address:
- NSSL/FRDD Rm 3332, 120 David L. Boren Boulevard, Norman, OK 73072
- Last Updated:
- Febuary 27, 2025
Current Professional Activities
- Chief Scientist for the NOAA/NSSL Warn on Forecast Program (June 2016 - present).
- Co-chair of UFS CAM working group (August 2018 – present).
- CIMMS Fellow, Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies, University of Oklahoma (1999 - present).
- WRF/MPAS Research Advisory Board and MPAS Science Advisory Committee (Sept 2023 – present).
- American Meteorological Fellow (Jan, 2024 - present).
Previous Work History at NSSL
- June of 1999: Joined NSSL as a federal scientist in the Weather Research and Development Division.
- 1999 through 2008: Helped fund and develop the SMART-R and NOAA-XP mobile radar systems with NSSL, OU, TAMU, and TTU collaborators.
- 2007 through 2010: On the VORTEX-2 science steering committee and helped lead NSSL's participation in the VORTEX2 project.
- September 2010: Joined NSSL's Forecast Research and Development Division and began work on the new NOAA's Warn on Forecast project which was to determine if storm-scale NWP could help extend tornado and other hazardous weather warning lead times.
- August 2012 through May 2016: Project manager for Warn on Forecast.
Research Interests
- Nonhydrostatic atmospheric model development (particularily numerical methods used to solve the non-hydrostatic compressible Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations)
- The use of the ensemble Kalman filter and the local particle filter to assimilate storm-scale radar and satellite observations for analysis and prediction
- Dynamics and predictability of severe storms and tornadoes
- Radar and other in situ observations of supercell thunderstorms
Professional History
I have a broad set of research interests which generally are focused on numerical analysis, simulation, and forecasts of severe convection and tornadoes. My original research interests in supercells and tornadoes can be traced back to nearly my high school days in the late 1970s. While obtaining my undergraduate and Master's degrees at University of Oklahoma in the 1980s, I became an avid storm chaser and eventually was fortunate enough to be able to work on some of the first in situ deployments of instruments near severe storms with my mentors: Howie Bluestein (OU) and later Don Burgess and Bob Davies-Jones (NSSL). I got the modeling bug while doing my work with Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen on satellite temperature assimilation for my Master's degree. I left Oklahoma in summer of 1986 to begin a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois. I was fortunate to have Dr. Robert Wilhelmson as my dissertation advisor and together we investigated tornadogenesis within supercells using some of the first sub-200m resolution numerical simulations. The work was facilitated and supported by one of the five original and newly formed NSF computing centers, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. I became very interested in the developing paradigm of "computational science" that is now ubiquitous across most scientific disciplines. During most of the 1990s I was a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University. In 1999 I was very fortunate to be able to return to my meteorological roots here in Norman as a scientist at the National Severe Storms Lab. My work today continues to focus on severe storms and tornadoes. The tremendous effort and resulting progress by hundreds of scientists during the past 30 years has led to a substantial increase in our scientific understanding of severe weather, and this progress has led to improved forecasts and more accurate warnings for the U.S. public.
Recent Publications
Warn on Forecast
Heinselman, P., P. C. Burke, L. J. Wicker, and coauthors, 2023: Warn-on-Forecast System: From Vision to Reality. Wea. Forecasting, 39, 75-95. PDF Available Here
McCurry, J. J. Poterjoy, K. Knopfmeier, and L. J. Wicker, 2023: Probabilistic Analysis of Severe Convective Storms through Non-Gaussian Data Assimilation. Mon. Wea. Rev., 152, 1609-1629. PDF Available Here
Galarneau, T. J., L. J. Wicker, K. H. Knopfmeier, W. Miller, P. S. Skinner, and K. A. Wilson, 2022: Short-Term Prediction of a Nocturnal Significant Tornado Outbreak Using a Convection-Allowing Ensemble. Wea. Forecasting, 37, 1027–1047. PDF Available Here
Dynamics of severe storms and tornadoes
Oliveira, M. I., M. Xue, B. Roberts, L. J. Wicker, and Nusrat Yussouf, 2019: Horizontal vortex tubes near a simulated tornado: Three-dimensional structure and kinematics. Atmosphere, 10 716. PDF Available Here
Flora, M. L., C. Potvin, L. J. Wicker, 2018: Practical Predictability of Supercells: Exploring Ensemble Forecast Sensitivity to Initial Condition Spread. Mon. Wea. Rev., 146, 2361-2379. PDF Available Here
Coffer, B., M. D. Parker, J. M. Dahl, L. J. Wicker, and A. J. Clark, 2017: Volatility of tornadogenesis: An ensemble of simulated nontornadic and tornadic supercells in VORTEX2 environments. Mon. Wea. Rev., 145, 4605-4625. PDF Available Here
Observation and analyses of supercells and tornadoes
Bluestein, H., J. A. Margraf, T. A. Greenwood, S. Emmerson, J. C. Snyder, L. J. Wicker, D. J. Bodine, 2025: The Evolution of Cyclonic and Anticyclonic Tornadoes in the Selden, Kansas, Supercell of 24 May 2021: Rapid-Scan, Polarimetric, Mobile, X-Band, Doppler-Radar Observations. Submitted to Mon. Wea. Rev., 24 Feb., 2025
Wienhoff, Z. B., H. E. Bluestein, D. W. Reif, R. M. Wakimoto, and L. J. Wicker, 2020: Analysis of debris signature characteristics and evolution in the 24 May 2016 Dodge City, Kansas, tornadoes. Mon. Wea. Rev. 148, 5063-5086. PDF available here.
Weinhoff, Z. B., H. B. Bluestein, L. J. Wicker, J. C. Snyder, A. Shapiro, C. K. Potvin, J. B. Houser, D. W. Reif, 2018: Applications of a spatially variable advection correction technique for temporal correction of dual-Doppler analyses of tornadic supercells. Mon. Wea. Rev., 146, 2949-2971. PDF available here.
Recent papers on the development of data assimilation methods for convective storms
Labriola, J., J. Gibbls, and L. J. Wicker, 2023: A method for generating a quasi-linear convective line suitable for observing system simulation experiments. Geosci. Model Dev., 66, 1779–1799. PDF Available Here
Labriola, J., and L. J. Wicker, 2022: Creating Physically-Coherent and Spatially-Correlated Perturbations to Initialize High-Resolution Ensembles of Simulated Convection. Quart. J. of Royal Meteor. 3131-3151. PDF Available Here
Kerr, C., L. J. Wicker, and P. Skinner 2020: Updraft-based adaptive assimilation of radial velocity observations in a Warn-on-Forecast system. Wea. Forecasting, Wea. Forecasting, 36, 1027-1047. PDF Available Here
Wang, Y., J. Gao, P. S. Skinner, K. Knopfmeier, T. Jones, G. Creager, P. L. Heinselman, L. J. Wicker, 2019: Test of a Weather-Adaptive Dual-Resolution Hybrid Warn-on-Forecast Analysis and Forecast System for Several Severe Weather Events. Wea. Forecasting. 34, 1807-1827. PDF Available Here
Poterjoy, J., L. J. Wicker, and M. Buehner 2019: Progress in the development of a nonlinear data assimilation strategy for high-dimensional systems. Mon. Wea. Rev. 147, 1107–1126. PDF Available Here
Numerical methods for nonhydrostatic models
Carley, J., C. Alexander, L. Wicker, C. Jablonowski, A. Clark, J.Nelson, I. Jirak, and K. Viner, 2024: Mitigation Efforts to Address Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) v1 Dynamical Core Performance Issues and Recommendations for RRFS v2. NCEP Office Note 516. PDF Available Here
Wicker, L. J. and W. C. Skamarock, 2020: An Implicit-Explicit Vertical Transport Scheme for Convective Allowing Models Mon. Wea. Rev. 148, 3893-3910. PDF Available Here
Flyer, N., G. Barnett, L. J. Wicker, 2016: Enhancing finite differences with radial basis functions: Experiments on the Navier–Stokes equations. J. Comp. Phys., 316 39-62. DOI: PDF Available Here
Wicker, L. J., and W. C. Skamarock, 2002: Time-splitting methods for elastic models using forward time schemes. Mon. Wea. Rev., 130, 2088–2097.
To search my complete list of recent publications, please see NSSL's Publications Search or download my curriculum vitae below.
Current Vitae
Louis J. Wicker (.pdf, last updated 27 February 2025)