Pal’s Research Group to Make Major Impact at World’s Largest Atmospheric Sciences Conference in New Orleans

The Boundary Layer Meteorology research group, led by Dr. Sandip Pal, an associate professor of atmospheric science in the Department of Geosciences at Texas Tech University, has made a significant impact at an upcoming international conference: the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), Jan. 11-16, 2025, in New Orleans, Louisiana. This event is the world's largest annual conference in atmospheric sciences. According to AMS, “Our Annual Meeting is the world’s largest yearly gathering for the weather, water, and climate community. It brings together great minds from a diverse set of scientific disciplines – helping attendees make career-long professional contact and life-long friends while learning from the very top people in the atmospheric sciences.”

Research from Pal’s group will be featured in 10 presentations: nine oral and one poster. Pal recently received acceptance letters for these presentations, and he believes this may be one of the largest contributions from a single research group in the history of the AMS meeting. The theme for the upcoming Annual Meeting is “Towards a Thriving Planet: Charting the Course Across Scales,” which aligns with Pal’s multidisciplinary research in boundary layer meteorology. His group’s work covers a wide range of topics, including turbulence, thermodynamics, wind energy, aerosol science, the carbon cycle, precipitation measurement, weather forecast model validation, urban climate, and dryland ecosystems.

The group’s research emphasizes empirical findings based on ground-based, airborne, and satellite measurements funded by the National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA. Pal currently leads a team of seven scholars and collaborates with researchers from multiple universities and institutions worldwide. His contributions at the AMS Annual Meeting reflect over six years of research since he joined Texas Tech in fall 2018.

In addition to presenting, Pal will chair and co-chair three sessions and panels and judge student posters at the AMS Annual Student Conference. He will also represent Texas Tech at the TTU Career Booth to attract potential graduate students for the Department of Geosciences. Pal is an active member of the AMS Committee on Measurements, part of the Scientific and Technological Activities Commission (STAC), with former student Nicholas Prince and current student Hassanpreet Dhaliwal also serving on the committee. Another group member, Matthew Hamel, is a student representative on the AMS Council. Pal regularly reviews articles for multiple AMS journals.

These contributions have helped raise the profile of Pal’s research group and Texas Tech within the nation’s largest atmospheric sciences community. Beyond AMS, Pal engages with the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) in the United Kingdom, where he serves as an editor for *Atmospheric Science Letters*, a recognized reviewer for several RMetS journals, and a member of the peer review training committee.