CMU Earth and Ecosystem Science Ph.D. student awarded prestigious Great Lakes Research Fellowship

Central Michigan University Earth and Ecosystem Science Ph.D. student Kyle Brooks has been awarded one of only three 2026 Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research Graduate Research Fellowships granted nationwide, giving him the opportunity to lead a summer field campaign focused on how the Great Lakes influence thunderstorm development.

“I was ecstatic! Being able to lead a field campaign as a Ph.D. student is an incredibly rare opportunity that I am grateful for,” Brooks said.

“I feel a sense of pride in representing CMU and the incredible research and scientists this school offers. It is the faculty and other students here that have helped me grow into a person capable of this kind of field work,” he added.

Brooks’ research examines how lake-breeze fronts form and contribute to thunderstorm development across the Great Lakes region. These fronts develop when cooler air from the lakes moves inland, creating boundaries that can trigger storms under the right atmospheric conditions.

“This work will result in new knowledge of how small-scale variability in temperature and moisture near lake-breeze fronts can affect if and where thunderstorms develop.”

The project has implications for people who live, work, and travel throughout the Great Lakes.

“The Great Lakes are a region of recreation, tourism, and shipping, where severe weather poses risk to property and life. Our goal is to better understand how to forecast these potentially severe events,” Brooks said.

Brooks and his team will use CMU’s Mobile Mesonet – a Ford Explorer outfitted with sensors to measure temperature, wind, pressure, and relative humidity – along with radiosondes, the instruments carried by weather balloons.

“The Mobile Mesonet will complete shore-to-inland ‘transects’ throughout the day to see how lake-breeze fronts develop and evolve, preceding the development of thunderstorms. Radiosondes will be launched along these same transects, so that the datasets can be used together to learn more about the evolution of these environments. The team will complete three transects per day over nine days, with specific dates this June and July targeted based on weather forecasts favoring lake-breeze fronts and thunderstorms. We expect to launch around 200 radiosondes during the full project, with up to eight launched per transect.”

The campaign, called Great Lakes Observations of the Variable Environments affecting Convection Initiation, or GLOVE-CI, builds on earlier National Science Foundation-funded work led by his advisor, CMU Earth and Atmospheric Sciences faculty member Jason Keeler. The team will operate in southwest Lower Michigan, the “Thumb” and near the Illinois-Wisconsin border to gather these data.

“Recent numerical model-based work in the Keeler lab has indicated that fine-scale variability in temperature and moisture near lake-breeze fronts can play a critical role in storm development; these observations will allow us to compare those simulations to the real world.”

Once the data is collected, they’ll work with scientists from the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR) and the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to apply a method called data assimilation to evaluate the impact regular observations like these could have on forecasting.

Brooks said this opportunity is valuable to his growth as a scientist.

“Getting out from behind a computer monitor to see what I’m studying in person and in real time, and using my meteorological intuition to help guide the team to sample the most useful data for my goals is exciting and a rare opportunity as a grad student. The opportunity to contribute to our understanding of the Great Lakes environment has excited me during my time at CMU and I’m sure that this opportunity will reinforce that excitement.”

He said he hopes the project highlights the value of scientific collaboration.

“I am so appreciative of this opportunity to help grow a productive and collaborative relationship between CMU, CIGLR, and NCAR. My hope is that my work shows what can come of these types of opportunities and collaborations.”