Adriana Bailey is an atmospheric scientist who studies the processes that control humidity, cloudiness, and precipitation. Her research probes questions on scales as small as clouds and as big as the globe and asks how variations in climate affect water availability and hydrological connections between places. She is particularly interested in questions of moisture transport and length scale, atmospheric mixing and its influence on cloudiness, and precipitation efficiency. Dr. Bailey works with a variety of long-duration observational time series as well as globally gridded datasets developed from satellite retrievals and model output. She uses a number of mathematical and statistical tools to evaluate spatial patterns and temporal periodicities to elucidate the underlying physics that set the hydroclimate state.
A former science news writer for the University of Colorado, Adriana Bailey credits writing about science, which requires asking lots of questions, for stoking her interest in scientific inquiry and for giving her the confidence to embrace what she doesn’t understand. After earning her PhD in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Dr. Bailey worked as a Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s aviation facility. She has clocked more than a hundred research flight hours making high-frequency measurements over places as diverse as the Western Pacific, the Caribbean, and ice-covered regions of the Norwegian Sea.