Meet Rochelle Worsnop

Rochelle Worsnop has been a Pathways student intern in the Physical Sciences Laboratory since July 2016 and is working closely with Michael Scheuerer and Tom Hamill in the Forecast and Modeling Development team. They are working to improve wind power ramp forecasts in the NOAA High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) system using statistical post-processing techniques and verification with tall meteorological towers.

Rochelle is also a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at CU Boulder working with her advisor, Dr. Julie Lundquist. There, she researches how hurricanes and complex terrain can affect wind turbine development and power production using large-eddy simulations and mesoscale models. Rochelle has also assisted in numerous field campaigns including the recent Wind Forecast Improvement Project 2 (WFIP2) in the Columbia River Gorge, where she worked alongside many PSL scientists on the Renewable Energy Team. Overall, she has enthusiastic interests in how meteorological phenomena affect renewable energy technologies.

Rochelle graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Meteorology from Florida State University in 2012 and completed an undergraduate thesis on extreme temperature events in the Southeastern US in collaboration with the Center for Ocean Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS) and the Florida Climate Center.

Besides all of her time spent being a graduate student, Rochelle also enjoys challenging hikes, scrambling, bike rides, the occasional storm chase, and trying out new (sometimes failed) recipes. She is born and raised in Florida, so snow and Chinooks still retain all of their wonder!