Rick Schulte awarded NASA grant

Ph.D. student Rick Schulte’s proposal was among 59, out of the 428 earth science projects reviewed this year, chosen to receive funding through the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology program. FINESST grants are for student-designed research projects that contribute to NASA’s Science Mission Directorate goals.

Schulte applied for the grant because he needed funding to pursue a research project idea for his Ph.D. prospectus. The grant will pay for the majority of his tuition, research and travel costs for the rest of his degree program.

Schulte’s advisor, Chris Kummerow, will be principal investigator on the project, Improving Satellite Retrievals of High Latitude Precipitation with Better Constraints on Drop Size Distributions, with Schulte as the future investigator. By the end of the project, they hope to have a better understanding of how drop size distributions vary in the high-latitude oceans, whether this variability can be linked to larger-scale atmospheric conditions, and the degree to which current and future satellite instruments are sensitive to changes in these distributions.

“This work should lead to an improvement in satellite rainfall retrieval algorithms, particularly in these high-latitude ocean areas where current algorithms exhibit a large degree of disagreement,” Schulte said.