Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology Commons^™

Data Contributing To Zuidema Et Al., 2019: "Is Summer African Dust Arriving Earlier At Barbados? The Updated Long-Term In-Situ Dust Mass Concentration Time Series From Ragged Point, Barbados And Miami, Florida”, Bulletin Of The American Meteorological Society., Paquita Zuidema

Supplementary Data and Tools

Daily-resolved time series of surface dust mass concentrations gathered at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in Miami, Florida from 1974 through December, 2018, and at Ragged Point, Barbados, from 193 through December, 2014, and primarily May-October of 2015-2018. The data were extracted from Whatman-41 filters sampling under pumped high-flow conditions. A fuller description of the sampling, data collection and analysis procedures can be found in Zuidema et al., 2019, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-18-0083.1). The data are available as separate files for Miami and Barbados, in both Excel and netcdf format.

Role Of Sea Surface Temperatures In Forcing Circulation Anomalies Driving U.S. Great Plains Pluvial Years, Paul X. Flanagan, Jeffrey B. Basara, Jason C. Furtado, Elinor R. Martin, Xiangming Xiao

High Plains Regional Climate Center: Staff Publications

In the U.S. Great Plains (GP), diagnosing precipitation variability is key in developing an understanding of the present and future availability of water in the region. Building on previous work investigating U.S. GP pluvial years, this study usesERAtwentieth century (ERA-20C) reanalysis data to investigate key circulation anomalies driving GP precipitation anomalies during a subset of GP pluvial years (called in this paper Pattern pluvial years). With previous research showing links between tropical Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies and GP climate variability, this study diagnoses the key circulation anomalies through an analysis of SSTs and their influence on the atmosphere. …

A New Model For Lifting Condensation Levels Estimation, Nihad E. Daidzic

Aviation Department Publications

Knowledge of and the ability to predict lifting condensation levels (LCL) is important ingredient in weather predictions, cloud formation, planetary albedo and Earth’s energy balance. It is also essential topic in aviation safety and flight operations. In this article, we derive a new model of LCL and compare it to some older commonly-used models. This includes also the recently published Romps’ (2017) model. The new model presented here includes dependence, however weak, of the surface atmospheric pressure and the specific humidity on the LCL height and temperature. Such is not the case with widely used models and expressions by Espy …

Climate Policy Implications Of Nonlinear Decline Of Arctic Land Permafrost And Other Cryosphere Elements, Dmitry Yumashev, Chris Hope, Kevin Schaefer, Kathrin Riemann-Campe, Fernando Iglesias-Suarez, Elchin Jafarov, Eleanor J. Burke, Paul J. Young, Yasin Elshorbany, Gail Whiteman

USF St. Petersburg Campus Faculty Publications

Arctic feedbacks accelerate climate change through carbon releases from thawing permafrost and higher solar absorption from reductions in the surface albedo, following loss of sea ice and land snow. Here, we include dynamic emulators of complex physical models in the integrated assessment model PAGE-ICE to explore nonlinear transitions in the Arctic feedbacks and their subsequent impacts on the global climate and economy under the Paris Agreement scenarios. The permafrost feedback is increasingly positive in warmer climates, while the albedo feedback weakens as the ice and snow melt. Combined, these two factors lead to significant increases in the mean discounted economic …

Influence Of Land Cover And Soil Moisture Based Brown Ocean Effect On An Extreme Rainfall Event From A Louisiana Gulf Coast Tropical System, Udaysankar S. Nair, Eric Rappin, Emily Foshee, Warren Smith, Roger A. Pielke Sr., Rezaul Mahmood, Jonathan L. Case, Clay B. Blankenship, Marshall Shepherd, Joseph A. Santanello, Dev Niyogi

High Plains Regional Climate Center: Staff Publications

Extreme flooding over southern Louisiana in mid-August of 2016 resulted from an unusual tropical low that formed and intensified over land. We used numerical experiments to highlight the role of the ‘Brown Ocean’ effect (where saturated soils function similar to a warm ocean surface) on intensification and it’s modulation by land cover change. A numerical modeling experiment that successfully captured the flood event (control) was modified to alter moisture availability by converting wetlands to open water, wet croplands, and dry croplands. Storm evolution in the control experiment with wet antecedent soils most resembles tropical lows that form and intensify over …

The Total Solar Eclipse Of 2017: Meteorological Observations From A Statewide Mesonet And Atmospheric Profiling Systems, Rezaul Mahmood, Megan Schargorodski, Eric Rappin, Melissa Griffin, Patrick Collins, Kevin Knupp, Andrew Quilligan, Ryan Wade, Kevin Cary, Stuart Foster

High Plains Regional Climate Center: Staff Publications

A total solar eclipse traversed 37 the continental United States on August 21, 2017. It 38 was the first such event in 99 years and provided a rare opportunity to observe the atmospheric response from a variety of instrumented observational platforms. This paper discusses the high quality observations collected by the Kentucky Mesonet (www.kymesonet.org), a research-grade meteorological and climatological observation network consisting of 72 stations and measuring air temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, solar radiation, wind speed, and wind direction. The network samples the atmosphere, for most variables, every three seconds and then calculates and records observations every five minutes. During …

Irrigation Impacts On Minimum And Maximum Surface Moist Enthalpy In The Central Great Plains Of The Usa, Tianyi Zhang, Rezaul Mahmood, Xiaomao Lin, Roger A. Pielke Sr.

High Plains Regional Climate Center: Staff Publications

Agricultural activities notably alter weather and climate including near-surface heat content. However, past research primarily focused on dry bulb temperature without considering the role of water vapor (dew point temperature) on surface air heat content. When using dry bulb temperature trends to assess these changes, for example, not including concurrent trends in absolute humidity can lead to errors in the actual rate of warming or cooling. Here we examined minimum and maximum surface moist enthalpy, which can be expressed as “equivalent temperature.” Using hourly climate data in the Central Great Plains (Nebraska and Kansas) from 1990 to 2014, the averages …

Enhancing Acis Maps: Increasing Usability Through A Gis Portal, Natalie Umphlett, Warren Pettee, Bill Sorensen, Crystal J. Stiles

High Plains Regional Climate Center: Staff Publications

The High Plains Regional Climate Center (HPRCC) is one of six NOAA Regional Climate Centers (RCCs) in the United States that aims to provide timely climate data and information to the public for cost-effective decision-making. As part of a three-tiered approach to climate services, the RCCs address needs on the national, regional, state, and local scales for a variety of sectors including agriculture, energy, natural resource management, research, transportation, and water resources. Working together, the RCCs develop and disseminate a wide range of valueadded climate products and services.

One of the HPRCC’s most popular products is the Applied Climate Information …

Conducting A Drought-Specific Thira (Threat And Hazard Identification And Risk Assessment): A Powerful Tool For Integrating All-Hazard Mitigation And Drought Planning Efforts To Increase Drought Mitigation Quality, Elliot Wickham, Deborah J. Bathke, Tarik Abdel-Monem, Tonya K. Bernadt, Denise Bulling, Lisa M. Pytlikzillig, Crystal J. Stiles, Nicole Wall

High Plains Regional Climate Center: Staff Publications

In the United States, drought is the second costliest natural disaster, which leads to the need for increased drought mitigation efforts over time. However, drought planning has lagged behind other hazard mitigation efforts, which is likely due to the lack of a national drought planning policy. Although the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) requires all jurisdictions have a hazard mitigation plan (HMP) to receive pre-disaster mitigation funds, drought has only recently been a requirement in HMPs. In 2012, Nebraska witnessed its worse drought in recent history, which exposed the gaps in drought planning effectiveness at all jurisdictional levels. To address …

A Recent Systematic Increase In Vapor Pressure Deficit Over Tropical South America, Armineh Barkhordarian, Bahareh Saatchi, Ali Behrangi, Paul C. Loikith, Carlos R. Mechoso

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

We show a recent increasing trend in Vapor Pressure Deficit (VPD) over tropical South America in dry months with values well beyond the range of trends due to natural variability of the climate system defined in both the undisturbed Preindustrial climate and the climate over 850–1850 perturbed with natural external forcing. This trend is systematic in the southeast Amazon but driven by episodic droughts (2005, 2010, 2015) in the northwest, with the highest recoded VPD since 1979 for the 2015 drought. The univariant detection analysis shows that the observed increase in VPD cannot be explained by greenhouse-gas-induced (GHG) radiative warming …

Classification Of Aerosol Population Type And Cloud Condensation Nuclei Properties In A Coastal California Littoral Environment Using An Unsupervised Cluster Model, Samuel A. Atwood, Sonia M. Kreidenweis, Paul J. Demott, Markus D. Petters, Gavin Cornwell, Andrew C. Martin, Kathryn A. Moore

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Aerosol particle and cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) measurements from a littoral location on the northern coast of California at Bodega Bay Marine Laboratory (BML) are presented for approximately six weeks of observations during the boreal winter–spring as part of the CalWater-2015 field campaign. The nature and variability of surface (marine boundary layer, MBL) aerosol populations were evaluated by classifying observations into periods of similar aerosol and meteorological characteristics using an unsupervised cluster model to derive distinct littoral aerosol population types and link them to source regions. Such classifications support efforts to understand the impact of changing aerosol properties on precipitation …

Wake Vortex Pair Formation As An Analog For Dust Devil And Tornado Genesis, Robert L. Ash

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

In 1966, meteorologist R.S. Scorer attempted to explain how large-scale oceanic tropical depressions become hurricanes or typhoons. His model was based on the idea that when these large-scale tropical depression structures begin to rotate, mostly due to Coriolis effects, an annular outer portion of that structure changes suddenly to a potential vortex segment, with the same outer radial limit as the low-pressure structure, but with an inner radius that conserves the overall system angular momentum and kinetic energy. By analogy with the "jump" instability describing sudden buckling of a vertical column, this paper shows that his conjecture merits additional consideration. …

Dust Storms And The Dispersal Of Aquatic Invertebrates In The Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion, Jose Rivas Jr.

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Chihuahuan Desert surrounding El Paso, Texas is one of the most intense sources of dust in the Western Hemisphere. Within this vast desert are ephemeral wetlands with micrometazoan propagules contained within their sediment egg banks. Dispersal of aquatic microinvertebrates between habitats is vital for the success of their populations. Passive dispersal of the propagules provides an escape mechanism from unfavorable conditions. Upon desiccation of these habitats, windstorms can potentially transport propagules mixed within entrained sediments across regional scales. To study this process, I collected falling sediment from 91 windstorms, with 59 samples collected at the University of Texas at …

Characterizing The 2015 Indonesia Fire Event Using Modified Modis Aerosol Retrievals, Yingxi R. Shi, Robert C. Levy, Thomas F. Eck, Brad Fisher, Shana Mattoo, Lorraine A. Remer, Ilya Slutsker, Jianglong Zhang

Atmospheric Sciences Faculty Publications

The Indonesian fire and smoke event of 2015 was an extreme episode that affected public health and caused severe economic and environmental damage. The MODIS Dark Target (DT) aerosol algorithm, developed for global applications, significantly underestimated regional aerosol optical depth (AOD) during this episode. The larger-than-global-averaged uncertainties in the DT product over this event were due to both an overly zealous set of masks that mistook heavy smoke plumes for clouds and/or inland water, and also an aerosol model developed for generic global aerosol conditions. Using Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) Version 3 sky inversions of local AERONET stations, we created …

Extratropical Precursors To The Onset Of Madden-Julian Oscillation Deep Convection Over The Western Indian Ocean, Jennifer Anne Gahtan

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) deep convection often initially forms over the western Indian Ocean and is frequently preceded by upper tropospheric circulation precursors. These precursors include subtropical cyclonic Rossby gyres near eastern Africa and Southwest Asia, coherent extratropically circumnavigating Rossby wave trains extending back across the Atlantic, and tropically circumnavigating easterlies. Easterly acceleration associated with the circulation precursors may help to reduce large-scale subsidence over the tropical Indian Ocean prior to convective onset; when intraseasonal easterly acceleration reaches the western extent of a region of intraseasonal upper level westerlies, it produces upper-tropospheric divergence, providing a forcing for upward motion.

Extreme Typhoon Rainfall Of Taiwan, Alexa Henny

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Taiwan has experienced large increases in extreme rainfall (ER, defined as top 1% by daily total) over the past 60 years. Using 1 km gridded daily rainfall data provided by the Taiwan Climate Change Projection and Adaptation Information Platform (TCCIP), we analyze Taiwan’s rainfall means and trends seasonally and as a function of intensity. ER accounts for about 17% of rainfall in Taiwan, but across much of the island, the 1960-2015 ER trend exceeds the non-extreme rainfall (NR) trend. Most ER occurs during the months of May – October, when warm, southwesterly monsoon flow and frequent typhoons lead to high …

Detection And Attribution Of Wind Energy Changes In The Contiguous United States, North Atlantic Ocean And European Sector In The Twentieth Century, Shengzhe Chen

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Wind power is playing a greater role as an alternative energy resource to fossil fuels. The prediction skills for hourly and daily forecasts of hub-height (80 – 100 m) wind power are increasingly reliable. However, regarding historical trends in wind energy availability (an important variable for determining wind farm capacity factors), little is known about the interannual and decadal variability of the hub-height wind speed. With climate change uncertainty now incorporated into wind energy resource assessment, insight into the relative contribution from the internal variability of the climate system versus the external forcing is presently lacking. Here, Empirical Orthogonal Function …

Convection-Permitting Ensemble Forecasts Of The 10-12 December 2013 Lake-Effect Snow Event: : Sensitivity To Microphysical, Planetary Boundary Layer, And Surface Layer Parameterizations, William Massey Bartolini

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Lake-effect snow (LeS) presents a substantial forecast challenge for convection-permitting models, due in part to uncertainties in the parameterization of microphysical (MP) and planetary boundary layer / surface layer (PBL/SL) processes. Here we focus on understanding these uncertainties for a LeS event that occurred during 10–12 December 2013 during the Ontario Winter Lake-effect Systems (OWLeS) field campaign. Throughout this event, long-lake-axis-parallel snowbands persisted downwind of the eastern shore of Lake Ontario, leading to snowfall accumulations as high as 105 cm (liquid precipitation equivalent of 64.5 mm) on the Tug Hill Plateau.

Design And Implementation Of The New York State Mesonet Flux Tower Network, Jason Michael Covert

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The New York State Mesonet (NYSM) was established in 2014 to provide high-quality real-time meteorological data for weather monitoring and forecasting, emergency management, and research aimed at improving numerical weather prediction. The mainstay of the network consists of 126 surface weather stations located throughout New York State with an average spacing of 30 km. In 2017, 17 of the sites (“flux” sites) were equipped with additional (permanent) instrumentation to measure short and long-wave radiation components, soil heat flux, and turbulent fluxes of momentum, sensible and latent heat, and carbon dioxide (CO2). The mesoscale resolution of the 17-site NYSM Flux Tower …

Precipitation Characteristics And Their Dependence On Data Resolution And Model Physics, Di Chen

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

To fully characterize precipitation, one often needs not only the accumulative amount (A), but also its frequency (F), intensity (I) and duration (D). These characteristics have large impacts on Earth’s hydrologic cycle. Aiming for a comprehensive understanding, this dissertation investigates precipitation characteristics and their dependence on data resolution and model physics using observational datasets and comprehensive global climate models (GCMs).

An Examination Of North Pacific Jet Regimes Conducive To Landfalling Atmospheric Rivers Along The West Coast Of North America, Eli Jacob Turasky

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Every year, the west coast of North America experiences significant economic damage and societal disruption due to the extreme precipitation associated with landfalling atmospheric rivers (ARs). ARs not only may produce significant economic and societal impacts, but also may contribute disproportionately to precipitation anomaly statistics along the west coast of the North America. The purpose of this study is to investigate: 1) the average state and evolution of the NPJ prior to AR landfall for selected categories of landfalling ARs; and 2) the dynamical processes applicable to the aforementioned categories of landfalling ARs that are linked to NPJ variability in …

Remote Sensing Of Planetary Boundary Layer Height And Particulate Matter 2.5 In New York State Mesonet Network, Bhupal Shrestha

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Abstract:

The Role Of The Subtropical Jet In Severe Dry Season Caribbean Rainstorms, Marshall D. Pfahler

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The Caribbean region experiences a bimodal climate with a dry season during November/December–May/June and a wet season encompassing the remainder of the year. Although significant high-impact heavy rainfall events in the Caribbean are typically associated with tropical cyclones (TCs) during the wet season, significant heavy rainfall events can also occur during the Caribbean dry season without contributions from TCs. Dry season Caribbean rainstorms (CRs) can produce infrastructure- and life-threatening conditions through flooding, mudslides, and damaging winds. The most severe dry season CRs can require international aid for vital recovery resources. Severe dry season CRs can produce rainfall totals that substantially …

Variability Of African Easterly Waves, Yuan-Ming Cheng

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

African Easterly Waves (AEWs) are the most important rain modulators in the sub-Saharan Africa and precursors for tropical cyclone genesis in the Atlantic. While most previous studies have focused on the mean structure and dynamics of AEWs, evidence has shown that AEWs can vary substantially in terms of their structure and characteristics. Therefore, the overarching goal of this dissertation is to document the variability of AEWs and understand its causes. The goal is accomplished through two different but complementary approaches: (1) statistical analysis and (2) vorticity tracking.

A New York State Mesonet Based Analysis Of Squall Line Cold Pool Strength And Uses For Short Term Forecasting, Daniel William Reese

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The recently finished New York State Mesonet (NYSM) has a network of 126 standard surface sites and 17 vertical profiler sites across the state. This high density network allows for a wide range of potential uses in research and operational forecasting. One such use is in the area of severe thunderstorm forecasting, where mesoscale and storm scale features can become highly important. This thesis examines three case studies, events from 2017-2018 that produced long-lived, high impact squall lines which moved across the state. As the squall line’s cold pool has long been recognized to play a critical role in squall …

Characterization Of Ambient Aerosols And Their Evolution Under Various Atmospheric Conditions In The Northeast U.S, Jie Zhang

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The University at Albany Atmospheric Sciences Research Center (ASRC) mobile laboratory, which includes a High Resolution Time-of-Flight Aerosol Mass Spectrometer (HR-ToF-AMS), a Scanning Mobility Particle Sizer (SMPS), and several gas sensors, etc., has been used to characterize atmospheric aerosols and air quality at different locations in the Northeastern US (including urban, forest, and mountain areas) and the aerosol evolutions under a variety of atmospheric conditions (including extreme weather, fog, and cloud, etc.). In this dissertation, I present the findings of the several field measurements using the ASRC mobile lab, focusing on the influences of extreme events (including high O3, heatwave, …

On The Frequency, Structure, And Characteristics Of Tropical Cyclone Diurnal Pulses, Sarah Dunn Ditchek

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Taking 6-h IR brightness temperature differences, Dunion et al. (2014) found that in major hurricanes, an area of cold cloud tops routinely propagated radially outward from the storm core at around 5–10 m/s over the course of each day. They defined this feature as a “diurnal pulse” and created a 24-h conceptual clock that identified at which radius the coldest cloud tops would be located based on local time (LT). Due to the inherent predictability of these pulses, this dissertation was undertaken to gain a deeper understanding of their frequency, structure, and characteristics.

A Revised Technique For Measuring Vertical Velocity Using Dropsondes, Timothy Connor Nelson

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The earliest iterations of dropsondes in the 1960's obtained vertical velocity by measuring the geometric fall speed of the dropsonde and the true airspeed (TAS) of the dropsonde from a pitot-static. The vertical velocity errors from this methodology were claimed to be ±1 m s-1. Subsequent dropsonde iterations used various forms of the drag force equation to obtain vertical velocity. The accuracy of these drag force-based measurements, however, are also quite large at ±1–2 m s-1. In this dissertation, an attempt is made to improve vertical velocity errors by revisiting and revising the pitot-static-derived TAS methodology on the eXpendable Digital …

The Simulated Impact Of Snow Cover And Soil Moisture On Convective Precipitation Within The Rocky Mountains Under Climate Warming, Brendan Charles Wallace

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Warm season moist diurnal convection can be particularly sensitive to changes in land surface

A Multiscale Analysis Of The Rainband And Cellular Structure In Hurricanes Harvey And Irma (2017) Using The Ncar Ensemble, Dylan Card

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Tropical cyclones pose a significant threat to life and property, and exhibit many severe weather hazards as they make landfall, such as storm surge, strong winds, flooding rains, and tornadoes. Tropical cyclone rainbands are associated with nearly all of these hazards, which can extend hundreds of kilometers inland. Thus, understanding tropical cyclone rainband structure, and the individual convective cells of which rainbands are composed, is important to mitigating risk. Several previous studies have documented the overall structure of tropical cyclone rainbands, including the cells of which they are comprised and the environments in which they are embedded. These studies have …