SOARS Manuscripts

The Pentagon Shield Project is an antiterrorist initiative to develop a system that models and predicts the dispersion of airborne toxins around the Pentagon. This system will depend on wind measuring instruments and estimation, or retrieval, techniques to provide input to dispersion models. A field…

The study of carbon interaction in alpine forests has, for the most part, been neglected by the science community. Studies have shown that carbon sinks are located in the northern hemisphere, and a recent satellite study has shown that possible carbon sinks are located in alpine forests throughout t…

The boundary layer contains a significant amount of the atmosphere's water vapor, which is important for storm development. However, operational meteorologists have difficulty determining representative specific humidity values through this layer because the tools that they use do not give enough in…

The Nimbus data processor was developed for the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Research Aviation Facility to process the raw data collected during research flights and to compute derived variables dependent on these measured parameters. Over its years of use scientists accepted on faith …

Located at a distance of approximately 90-km above the Earth's surface, the ionosphere is distinguished by a relatively high density of positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons distributed in several distinct regions. In part to facilitate the study of the ionosphere, the Thermospher…

Dual-Doppler analysis of the 17 April 1995 data collected by the National Center for Atmospheric Research airborne Electra Doppler Radar during the Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment was used to resolve the kinematic structure of the storm, which was used to perform a ha…

Climate change and air quality are two intimately linked environmental problems. An increasing amount of heat-trapping gases have been emitted into the atmosphere because of anthropogenic activities, such as the combustion of fossil fuels. Some of the emitted gases both cause the atmosphere to warm …

Atmospheric nanoparticles, defined as having a spherical equivalent diameter smaller than 50 nanometers (nm), have become a major interest to atmospheric scientists. It is believed that these particles form an integral part of important atmospheric processes such as cloud formation, precipitation an…

Over the past decade, a network of Multifilter Rotating Shadowband Radiometers (MFRSRs) has been monitoring aerosol properties across the nation. Data collected by the MFRSRs could improve climate models, characterize weather events, and correct and validate satellite signals. Before this can happen…

Floods cause billions of dollars worth of annual losses to physical property, crops, and public infrastructure. Annual flood losses, which have increased from 1929 to 2003, average approximately 6.5 billion U.S. dollars. A common assumption is that increasing flood damage over time is caused by incr…

One of the more significant forms of mesoscale convective organization is the bow echo. Although bow-shaped convective lines are relatively small in scale (20-120 km long), they can produce damaging straight-line winds over periods of several hours across swaths of several hundred kilometers. Bow ec…

MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Radio Spectrometer) data were analyzed to determine if different aerosol types, i.e. desert dust, forest fire smoke, and human produced (anthropogenic) aerosols, can be identified using the angstrom coefficient. Aerosol optical depths, fine mode ratios, and angstro…

Mineral aerosols, also referred to as desert dust or soil particles, represent an important radiative forcing agent on the climate system, but the anthropogenic contribution to total dust loading is not well known. Results of several studies attempting to constrain the landuse portion of mineral aer…

Several differences in velocity profiles were observed in the high- and low-mode data collected by the 915-MHz wind profiler at San Cristóbal Island, Galápagos. Those differences are important because they prevent us from merging the data into one set. Some types of differences are expected because …

Global Positioning System (GPS) radio occultation (RO) is a new technique for obtaining profiles of atmospheric properties, specifically: refractivity, temperature, pressure, water vapor, and electron density. Low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, equipped with a GPS receiver, track GPS radio signals as…

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Electrodynamics General Circulation Model (TIME-GCM) simulated diurnal tides also observed in National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetic Dynamics (TIMED) satellit…

Stable oxygen isotope ratios (δ¹⁸O) can be used to better quantify sources and sinks of carbon dioxide (CO₂), a major greenhouse gas. Furthermore, because δ¹⁸O serves as a link between water and carbon cycles, it can be used to understand how climate change will impact precipitation. The Institute o…

Research on the formation of tropical cyclones, while spanning decades, has been limited compared to research on the dynamics and prediction of mature tropical cyclones. The relative de-emphasis on tropical cyclone formation research is linked with the tendency of these systems to form several days …

The crystallization and growth of ice on surfaces has been a neglected area of research. Anyone who has visited or lived in a temperate or cold climate has noticed the remarkable frost growth that occurs on a glass surface. Frost forms on surfaces below the freezing point of water and in supersatura…

Studies of reflectivity gradients are necessary to understand the factors affecting wind profiler measurements. Wind profiling radars reflect radio waves from atmospheric variations in the lower troposphere and are used to measure winds. The change in these reflectivities over a given range is refer…

In numerical cloud models, drop populations are represented with either a bulk or an explicit representation of cloud physics. Bulk representation consists of drops characterized by the same size and pH. Explicit representation consists of drop of carrying size and pH. The manner in which cloud drop…

The outflow from deep convection influences the budgets of water vapor and other trace constituents in the upper troposphere, and may lead to ozone depletion and long term climate change as a result of radiative cooling. However, the processes that control the altitude of convective outflow are poor…

The Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus, Phase II (DYCOMS-II) experiment provided us a unique opportunity for in-depth study of the dropsonde humidity sensor's performance within well-layered stratocumulus clouds. We analyzed plots of the dropsonde's relative humidity (RH) profiles from D…

Fluid flows play a dominant role in many processes that are important to mankind, such as weather, climate, industrial process, cooling, heating, etc. Scientific understanding of fluid flows has increased since the introduction of High Performance Computing (HPC) and the use of Computational Fluid D…

Climate models are important tools to understand and determine past, present, and future climate conditions. Therefore climate model validation is necessary. The aim of this project is to compare the Parallel Climate Model (PCM) with the National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Center …