Muge Komurcu Bayraktar

Muge obtained her Ph.D. from Penn State University, Department of Meteorology.  Her research focuses on the representation of the cloud ice processes in models. When ice crystals and cloud droplets co-exist in cold clouds, ice can grow to larger sizes while depleting the cloud liquid water droplets. Correctly predicting the cloud liquid water contents is essential because cloud droplets influence the radiative energy at the surface and if not well represented in models, it can lead to errors in future climate predictions. Both smaller scale cloud resolving models and larger scale climate models fail to predict the phase partitioning of water between cloud droplets and ice crystals. During her Ph.D., Muge worked on the phase partitioning between liquid water and ice in Arctic clouds using a small-scale cloud resolving model. She particularly focused on the influences of the number of the ice nucleating aerosols, ice formation mechanisms and the shape of the formed ice crystals on the cloud persistence and lifetime. During her post-doctoral studies at Yale University, she continues to work on the phase partitioning of cloud water in models focusing on climate models. She is working on a climate model inter-comparison study, where she is comparing the differences in model predicted fields due to differences in the representations of the cloud processes in six different climate models. Muge has dual bachelor’s degrees in Meteorology and Environmental Engineering and a Master’s degree in Meteorology from Istanbul Technical University.