AN ALUMNA of the Philippine Science High School-Cordillera Administrative Region campus has been selected for the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology program.

The proposal of Gabrielle ‘Bee’ Leung was one of 62 selected from 394 submitted to the Earth Science Division.

Leung will work with her adviser, University Distinguished Professor Sue van den Heever, to understand how changes to land surface — for example through deforestation or urbanization, impact tropical cloud properties in conjunction with changes to the aerosol environment.

They will focus on the Maritime Continent, a region of the world undergoing rapid changes to both land cover and aerosol emissions.

“There is still a lot of disagreement about whether land-cover changes in the region would increase or decrease precipitation overall,” Leung said.

“It’s a very complicated problem, since changing the land cover consists of simultaneous changes to many physical parameters, such as latent and sensible heat fluxes, surface roughness and convergence, and aerosol sources,” she added.

Leung and her adviser will use a combination of satellite observations, realistic region-scale modeling and idealized large eddy simulations to quantify the magnitude of aerosol-land surface impacts on convection and explore the mechanisms driving those impacts.

The grant may be applied for up to three years.