Properties of Convective Outflow during the TRACER Campaign - Abstract
Board Location: #10
Discipline: Ecology Environmental and Earth Sciences
Subcategory: Geosciences and Earth Sciences
Session: 2
Jordan Newton - Texas Southern University
Properties of Convective Outflow during the TRACER Campaign – AbstractJordan Love Newton, Texas Southern UniversityDeep convective clouds play an important role in the global climate and local weather conditions including components of hazardous and sever weather. Convective updraft and downdraft dynamics play an important role in the transport of water, heat, momentum, chemical species and aerosols within the troposphere. Through these processes, these clouds play a critical role in the Earth’s climate system, however despite their importance, the processes that drive convective cloud lifecycles remains poorly understood, hindering our ability to simulate them in numerical weather models. The TRacking Aerosol Convection interactions ExpeRiment (TRACER) campaign, deployed by the Department of Energy© Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) facility, was designed to collect data to better understand the evolution of convective clouds along with their properties as they initiate, propagate, and decay. My research project engaged at BNL used data collected during the TRACER campaign to investigate connections between meteorological characteristics and outflow air with the purpose of creating sufficient models of convective clouds. The project was executed with the utilization of MATLAB, Linux, and data extracted from the Atmospheric Research Facility (ARM) website. Important variables were configured into plots based on critical days in the operational period, then compared to radar imagery which spanned the site of interest 24/7. These variable plots and radar images allowed for determination of periods when the surface observations were influenced by air flowing out of the convective cells and the ability to quantify the characteristics, including temperature, humidity, and wind speed, of that air. The project concluded with observations of direct quantification of the equivalent potential temperature of the outflow air which can be used to estimate the originating height of the convective downdraft. Further quantities can be investigated with continued research efforts.Funder Acknowledgement(s): The research program is conducted under the Research Development and Partnership Pilot Program (RDPP) through the Computational Modeling of Atmospheric Processes (CMAP) grant provided by the Department of Energy (DOE). Faculty Advisor: Dr. Victor Migenes – Texas Southern UniversityMentor: Dr. Michael Jensen – Brookhaven National Laboratory – Department of Energy
Funder Acknowledgement(s): The research program is conducted under the Research Development and Partnership Pilot Program (RDPP) through the Computational Modeling of Atmospheric Processes (CMAP) grant provided by the Department of Energy (DOE).
Faculty Advisor: Mentor: Michael Jensen, MJensen@bnl.gov
Role: My participation in this project was to compute plots, graphs, and create code to read data from ARM databases to be interpreted into valuable variables.