NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Owen Kelley uses space-based and ground-based instruments to study changes in hurricane structure that occur over several hours or days. He has recently published two papers in Geophysical Research Letters describing how radar data can be used to predict when a hurricane's surface wind intensity is about to increase. In the future, Kelley would like to discover why "Hot Towers," tall rain clouds often just three miles across, are so intimately connected with what happens to hurricanes, which are several hundred miles across. Kelley also develops visualization software for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite launched in 1997 and the Global Precipitation Measuring (GPM) satellite to be launched after 2010. Kelley feels that this is an exciting time to study hurricanes because many discoveries are about to be made through frequent, high-resolution observations.

Since 1997, Kelley has been a researcher at NASA Goddard. In 2008, Kelley earned a Ph.D. in Computational Sciences from George Mason University. In 1993, he earned his undergraduate degree from St. John's College, the "Great Books" school in Annapolis, Maryland.

Rob Gutro
Goddard Space Flight Center