Sam Trahan

I am a hurricane researcher, dessert artist and programmer who works for the US government's Environmental Modeling Center, helping in the development of the 2012 HWRF model, a real-time supercomputer simulation used by the National Weather Service for hurricane prediction. I just finished a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Physics at UMBC, and I'm in the middle of putting together publications related to my thesis.

I'm also looking for long-term employment, as my position at EMC is a temporary, grant-based one, in an organization with serious funding issues. I'm looking for a job in hurricane research, forecasting model development, software engineering or HPC support. See my resumes if you are interested in employing me, or if you know someone who may be. I have two resumes: one explains my software engineering and scientific support experience (sam-trahan-resume-software.pdf). The other explains my scientific research experience, which is not as extensive as my tech experience (sam-trahan-resume-science.pdf).

My research is in the field of atmospheric physics, specifically hurricane inner core dynamics. Hurricane inner core dynamics is the study of the inner core region of hurricanes. Generally, the inner core region is considered to be the eye, eyewall (or eyewalls) and innermost rainbands. Specifically, I am studying various mesoscale (small) flow patterns and convection in real and simulated hurricanes. My intent is to develop model diagnostics that will determine how well current operational forecasting models represent these small features. Most importantly, I am working on producing a high-resolution version of the HWRF model, that does a good job of representing these features. This research is supported by both UMBC and NOAA (as part of my job at NOAA).

My hurricane research is not my only research. I also spend time inventing new cheesecakes and low-fat vegan desserts to mail to my various friends and cousins. These masterpieces that I have created were partly designed by my chief cooking advisor, Deborah Kollonige, another graduate student who was in the same program as I. I'm hoping to add a few webpages on this site with recipes for these amazing creations, but that will have to wait until I and my chief cooking adviser have more free time, after we catch up on research later this year.

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