Joshua Wurman

Josh Wurman
being interviewed in a DOW unit
Born	(1960-10-01) October 1, 1960 (age 56) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
Fields	Atmospheric sciences
Institutions	National Center for Atmospheric Research University of Oklahoma Center for Severe Weather Research
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (S.B., 1982; S.M., 1982; Sc.D., 1991)
Thesis	Forcing Mechanisms of Thunderstorm Downdrafts (1991)
Doctoral advisor	Earle Williams
Other academic advisors	Raymond Pierrehumbert Fred Sanders
Doctoral students	Curtis Alexander
Known for	Weather radar, tornado, and hurricane research; field research and inventions

Joshua Michael Aaron Ryder Wurman (born October 1, 1960) is an American atmospheric scientist and inventor noted for tornado, tropical cyclone, and weather radar research.

Joshua Wurman's father is noted architect and founder of the TED conferences, Richard Saul Wurman. He attended Radnor High School in suburban Philadelphia. He earned a S.B. in physics and interdisciplinary science in 1982, a S.M. in meteorology in 1982, and a Sc.D. in meteorology in 1991, all from MIT. His masters thesis was The Long Range Dispersion of Radioactive Particulates and his doctoral dissertation was Forcing Mechanisms of Thunderstorm Downdrafts. He moved to Boulder, Colorado to work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and later to Norman, Oklahoma where he was a tenured faculty member at the University of Oklahoma (OU). He founded the Center for Severe Weather Research (CSWR) in 1998, which operates the Doppler On Wheels (DOW) radars. Wurman returned to Boulder in 2001.

Wurman is particularly interested in researching tornadogenesis and amassing sufficient datasets of tornado structure and dynamics observations for tornado climatology study. He is also the discoverer of sub-kilometer hurricane boundary layer rolls, and wrote the pioneering papers on mapping tornado winds, multiple vortices, and other tornado-related phenomena.

Joshua Wurman participated in both the VORTEX projects, doing early deployments of the first scraped together DOW radars for VORTEX1 and served on the steering committee and was a principal investigator (PI) for VORTEX2, the field research phase of which occurred from 2009-2010. Wurman's team observed the top two fastest wind events and two contenders for the largest tornado circulations. He leads the ROTATE (Radar Observations of Tornadoes And Thunderstorms Experiment)tornado observational project every spring and hurricane intercepts in the fall. A current major project of his is studying lake-effect snow in the OWLeS.