CAREER: BREEZE: Boundary-layer REsearch and Education ZonE

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The turbulent movement of air is important for the transport of heat, momentum and moisture throughout the atmosphere. Turbulence is generally thought of as a small-scale phenomenon, and the generation and dissipation of turbulence has been assumed to be within one grid cell of a numerical weather model. However, with computer models running at finer resolution, it is not clear that this assumption is valid. This award will make use of a catalog of observations of wind and turbulence from lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) systems to study turbulence dissipation. The study will have an impact on weather forecasting, with specific applications to wind power production, air quality forecasting, fog, and forest fires. As a CAREER award, there is also a very large educational and outreach component. The focus of this aspect of the award is on creating teaching materials that are visually appealing and can be used from the middle school ages on up. The research team will help to create a lesson plan and to work with teachers to ensure use of the materials. A specific focus will be on the implementation of the materials in rural, under-served Colorado classrooms.Turbulence production and dissipation is assumed to be locally balanced in numerical models. However, as the models are run at finer resolution, this assumption no longer holds. The goal of this research project is to determine at what spatio-temporal scale the local imbalance between turbulence production and dissipation becomes important. Four research activities are planned to address this goal: (1) Quantify uncertainty in lidar estimates of dissipation, (2) Quantify the variability of dissipation through the construction of a data archive consisting of measurements classified by different meteorological and physical conditions, (3) Compare simulated dissipation variability to observations using WRF and WRF-LES modeling systems, (4) Test new parameterizations that do not assume locally balanced turbulence production and dissipation.