Professor of Meteorology
B.S., 1971; M.S., 1972; Ph.D., 1976, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Homepage: http://weather.ou.edu/~hblue
Email:
Phone: (405) 325-3006
Dr. Bluestein is excited by all sorts of weather phenomena, particularly those of a violent nature. His research interests are the observation and physical understanding of weather phenomena on convective, mesoscale, and synoptic scales. On the convective scale, he is interested in determining the flow pattern in tornadoes using portable Doppler radar and visual observatio ns. He is also interested in using ground-based and airborne Doppler radars and lidars to probe the wind field in severe convective storms in order to understand their structure and behavior. He is interested in determining what controls the type of convective storm that forms using mobile rawinsonde data, wind profiler data, radar data, satellite imagery, and numerical simulations. He is particularly interested in determining exactly what triggers convective storms. On the mesoscale, he is interested in the dryline, and its role in triggering convective storms. He is also interested in fronts, the mesoscale organization of precipitation, and the structure of convection in the eyewall of hurricanes. (He has flown into the eye of hurricanes six times.) He would like to develop techniques for determining the horizontal wind field from single-Doppler radar data. On the synoptic scale, he is interested in the behavior of the subtropical jet, subtropical cirrus, lee cyclones, jet streaks, and the behavior of the long-wave pattern. Forecasting and nowcasting using modern observing systems is also one of his great interests.