Kara Hartig
2024 Visiting Fellow Post Doc
About Kara
Kara Hartig is a postdoc at CIRES through the Visiting Fellows Program. Her research is centered on the Arctic, with a particular focus on clouds and their effects on surface conditions, influences on North American extreme weather, and upwards and downwards interactions with the stratosphere. She uses a combination of models and observations to tease out the physical mechanisms driving atmospheric conditions in the Arctic and how they might change in a warmer climate.
Specialties
Current Research
Revealing the Drivers of Arctic Cloud Regimes and Their Surface Impacts: Arctic clouds play a central role in determining how much energy is absorbed by the underlying land, ocean, and sea ice. Particularly in winter, when there is no direct sunlight, clouds trap heat released by the ocean or land to keep the surface warm whereas clear skies allow the surface to radiate freely and cool rapidly. The amount of time spent in cloudy versus clear conditions helps to set the surface temperature and surface energy budget, but the mechanisms controlling those time scales and their response to a rapidly warming Arctic are unclear. Hartig's postdoctoral research uses a combination of ground-based measurements and a high-resolution weather model to identify key time scales of cloud formation and dissipation and their predictability based on conditions upwind.
