Delián Colón Burgos receives the Riehl Award

(2026-05-07) -- written by Levi Silvers

Delián Colón Burgos received the Herbert Riehl award in recognition for her paper, “Convective Organization in African Easterly Waves Observed During the NAMMA and CPEX‐CV Field Campaign”, recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. Delián was at the annual meeting of the European Geophysical Union and was unable to receive the award in person and present her work, so Professor Bell accepted the award on her behalf. She will present her research to CSU’s Department of Atmospheric Science at a later date.

The annual Riehl Award is named after the late Professor Herbert Riehl, the founder of CSU’s Department of Atmospheric Science. It is given to a student based on impactful research from their work on an M.S. degree in the department.

Congratulations Delián! Delián’s work dives into the details of the different ways that tropical convection can be organized in the early stages of easterly waves, which in many cases develop into TC’s. Her research uses multiple sources of observations as well as a novel computational method to combine observations with ERA5 reanalysis data. The observations that Delián used were gathered during two distinct field campaigns in the tropical Atlantic.