Dr. Jesse Loveridge
I work on developing and validating cloud remote sensing techniques and applying them to better understand the factors that control their contributions to the Earth’s radiation budget.
My interest in atmospheric sciences was sparked by Prof. Roger Davies and Prof. Gilles Bellon at the University of Auckland, after I took some of their courses on a whim during my physics degree. I was immediately invested. Atmospheric science is a field of myriad complexity, making it an endless source of fascination as one never quite knows whether to what degree some microphysical process affects the macro scale behavior.
Despite the fact that the atmosphere is “right there”, there are actually few opportunities to measure it, especially in a controlled manner. Remote sensing is one of those few ways and remote sensing using reflected solar radiation is one of the most powerful due to its strong sensitivity to the size, shape and composition of aerosol and cloud particles and our capacity to make high resolution (~15 m) measurements from space. Unfortunately, every cloud is different, due to the turbulent nature of the atmosphere. This means that we need to utilize flexible retrieval algorithms that can model and retrieve the 3D volumetric structure of the atmosphere.
In my PhD work I developed a tomographic technique for retrieving the 3D properties of scattering particles from multi angle imagery using 3D radiative transfer, called Atmospheric Tomography with 3D Radiative Transfer (AT3D). I also worked on a variety of different projects such as combining thermal radiances and visible stereoscopy to retrieve multilayered cloud heights, analyzing the detectability of ice seeding signatures with radar, and validating retrievals of cloud droplet size with airborne cloud probes and simulations.
I joined Prof. Christine Chiu’s group in 2023 as a Postdoc to work on techniques that fuse active remote sensing by radar and lidar with passive imagery to retrieve 3D cloud properties.
Education
Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences (2023), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
M.Sc in Physics (2018), University of Auckland, New Zealand.
B.Sc (Hons) (2017), University of Auckland, New Zealand
Publications
Loveridge, J. & Di Girolamo, L. (2023). Do Subsampling Strategies Reduce the Confounding Effect of Errors in Bispectral Retrievals on Estimates of Aerosol Cloud Interactions? Under Review for Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.
Zarema, T. J., Rauber, R. M., Di Girolamo, L., Loveridge, J. R. and McFarquhar, G. M. (2023). On the radar detection of cloud seeding effects in wintertime orographic cloud systems. J. Appl. Meteor. Climatol., https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-22-0154.1, in press.
Loveridge, J., Levis, A., Di Girolamo, L., Holodovsky, V., Forster, L., Davis, A.B., and Schechner, Y. Y. (2023). Retrieving 3D distributions of atmospheric particles using Atmospheric Tomography with 3D Radiative Transfer – Part 2: Local optimization, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 16, 3931-3957, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-16-3931-2023.
Mitra, A., Loveridge, J. R., & Di Girolamo, L. (2023). Fusion of MISR Stereo Cloud Heights and Terra-MODIS Thermal Infrared Radiances to Estimate Two-layered Cloud Properties. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 128, e2022JD038135. https:/doi.org/10.1029/2022JD038135.
Loveridge, J., Levis, A., Di Girolamo, L., Holodovsky, V., Forster, L., Davis, A.B., and Schechner, Y. Y. (2023). Retrieving 3D distributions of atmospheric particles using Atmospheric Tomography with 3D Radiative Transfer – Part 2: Local optimization, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 16, 3931-3957, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-16-3931-2023.
Reid, J., … Loveridge, J., et al. (2023). The coupling between tropical meteorology, aerosol science, convection and the energy budget during the Clouds, Aerosol, Monsoon Processes Philippines Experiments (CAMP2Ex), Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-21-0285.1
Fu, D., … Loveridge, J., et al. (2022). An evaluation of liquid cloud droplet effective radius derived from MODIS, airborne remote sensing and in situ measurements from CAMP2Ex, Atmos. Chem. Phys. https://doi.org.10.5194/acp-2022-73.
Levis, A., Schechner, Y.Y., Davis, A.B., Loveridge, J. (2020). Multi-View Polarimetric Scattering Cloud Tomography and Retrievals of Droplet Size. Remote Sensing. 12, 2831. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12172831
Loveridge, J., & Davies, R. (2019). Cloud heterogeneity in the marine midlatitudes: Dependence on large-scale meteorology and implications for general circulation models. J. Geophysical. Res. Atmos., 124, 3448-3463. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JD029826.