Atmospheric Sciences Commons^™

Improved Ballistic Wind Prediction Using Projectile Tracking Data, William Arthur Kenney

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The United States Air Force AC-130 gunships have been in operation since the Vietnam War and have seen frequent use during recent conflicts. They are able to employ gun weapon systems from above a target in a way that maximizes possible time on target. When firing, the gun operators must deal with miss distances caused by winds acting on the projectile in flight. Operators currently perform a “tweak” to predict a ballistic wind affecting fired rounds which is then used in the fire-control to correct for the real winds and bring shots onto target. This correction, a single-point wind prediction, …

Ab Initio Computation Of Radiative Properties Of Monatomic Hydrogen, Fanny Thomas

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

With renewed interest in planetary atmospheric entry, descent, and landing, NASA has noted a need for improved physics modeling in computational fluid dynamics. Uncertainty in experimental data used in radiation heat transfer computations leads to “over-engineering” of entry body heat shields, at large weight and cost penalties. There is interest in developing hypersonic thermophysics models from the known “first principles” of physics.

A method for computing high temperature gas emissivity and absorptivity from quantum mechanics principles is developed. The Schroedinger wave equation is cast as a discretized matrix eigenvalue problem which is solved using the ERAU parallel supercomputer. The numerical …

A Predictor Analysis Framework For Surface Radiation Budget Reprocessing Using Design Of Experiments, Patricia Allison Quigley

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Earth’s Radiation Budget (ERB) is an accounting of all incoming energy from the sun and outgoing energy reflected and radiated to space by earth’s surface and atmosphere. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)/Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) Surface Radiation Budget (SRB) project produces and archives long-term datasets representative of this energy exchange system on a global scale. The data are comprised of the longwave and shortwave radiative components of the system and is algorithmically derived from satellite and atmospheric assimilation products, and acquired atmospheric data. It is stored as 3-hourly, daily, monthly/3-hourly, and monthly averages of 1°x1° …