Ed Zipser’s Global Influence on the Direction of Meteorology

Ed Zipser is legendary as an aircraft scientist and field experimenter. However, his greatest contribution may be his contributions via work with the TRMM and GPM satellites. Ed's work as a field experimenter has led to innovative understanding of the mesoscale air motions and thermodynamic processes within deep convection, squall lines, and tropical cyclone rainbands. But beyond that, he has tirelessly worked to understand how these phenomena are distributed over the globe by using satellite data to identify key convective and mesoscale phenomena from space. His satellite-based work shows how deep convection and mesoscale processes play out differently in different climatic regimes. This work will have enduring value as global models take on finer resolution and must represent convection and its mesoscale organization accurately in all environments, both explicitly and in parameterization schemes. In this retrospective, we will examine the power of the database that Ed and his protégés have developed for analyzing convective and mesoscale phenomena with the TRMM and GPM datasets.