Atmospheric Sciences Commons^™

Challenges In Quantifying Air‐Water Carbon Dioxide Flux Using Estuarine Water Quality Data: Case Study For Chesapeake Bay, Maria Herrmann, Raymond G. Najjar, Fei Da, Jaclyn R. Friedman, Marjorie A. M. Friedrichs, Sreece Goldberger, Alana Menendez, Elizabeth H. Shadwick, Edward G. Stets, Pierre St-Laurent

Publications and Research

Estuaries play an uncertain but potentially important role in the global carbon cycle via CO₂ outgassing. The uncertainty mainly stems from the paucity of studies that document the full spatial and temporal variability of estuarine surface water partial pressure of carbon dioxide ( pCO₂). Here, we explore the potential of utilizing the abundance of pH data from historical water quality monitoring programs to fill the data void via a case study of the mainstem Chesapeake Bay (eastern United States). We calculate pCO₂ and the air-water CO₂ flux at monthly resolution from 1998 to …

Projections Of Change In Frequency And Persistence In Atmospheric Ridging Over The Pacific Northwest Using Cmip6 Models, Ellen Koukel

University Honors Theses

The hydroclimatology of the Pacific Northwest is characterized by wet winters and dry summers; however, the end of the rainy season is subject to considerable year-to-year variability. Early onset of the dry season can introduce challenges for water resource managers. Historically, anomalously dry springs are the result of persistent atmospheric ridging, with notable examples in May 2015 and 2018. As climate change may affect the persistence and frequency of ridges, it is important to understand potential changes in springtime ridging. Future changes will have implications for the length of the rainy season and consequently freshwater availability throughout the region. Therefore, …

Karena Mckinney: Mapping A Clearer Picture Of Air Pollution's Effects, Christina Nunez

Colby Magazine

"If we want to control air quality and address climate change, the solution won't involve fiddling with nature's emissions-it will be about cleaning up man-made ones." -Karena McKinney, associate professor of atmospheric chemistry

The Shape Of Earth And Pressure Altimetry, Nihad E. Daidzic

Aviation Department Publications

FAA Safety Webinar (GL15100313) held online at 8:45 CST on Saturday, May 16, 2020.

Development Of Novel Instrumentation And Methods To Investigate The Composition And Phase Partitioning Of Semivolatile And Intermediately Volatile Organic Compounds In Atmospheric Organic Aerosol, Claire Fortenberry

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Atmospheric particulate matter (PM) is ubiquitous in both indoor and outdoor air and is generally detrimental to human health. PM composed of particles with aerodynamic diameters less than 2.5 um (PM2.5) are related to adverse health outcomes including heart disease and respiratory disease. Fundamentally, particle physical properties such as size and hygroscopicity are dictated by chemical composition, which can be highly complex, particularly for organic aerosol (OA). In both outdoor and indoor air, OA is composed substantially of intermediately volatile and semivolatile organic compounds (I/SVOCs), which exist in both gas and particle phases under typical atmospheric conditions. The distribution of …

Synergistic Use Of Remote Sensing And Modeling For Estimating Net Primary Productivity In The Red Sea With Vgpm, Eppley-Vgpm, And Cbpm Models Intercomparison, Wenzhao Li, Surya Prakash Tiwari, Hesham El-Askary, Mohamed Ali Qurban, Vassilis Amiridis, K. P. Manikandan, Michael J. Garay, Olga V. Kalashnikova, Thomas C. Piechota, Daniele C. Struppa

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Primary productivity (PP) has been recently investigated using remote sensing-based models over quite limited geographical areas of the Red Sea. This work sheds light on how phytoplankton and primary production would react to the effects of global warming in the extreme environment of the Red Sea and, hence, illuminates how similar regions may behave in the context of climate variability. study focuses on using satellite observations to conduct an intercomparison of three net primary production (NPP) models--the vertically generalized production model (VGPM), the Eppley-VGPM, and the carbon-based production model (CbPM)--produced over the Red Sea domain for the 1998-2018 time period. …

Lightning Activity In The Continental United States On An Enso Time Scale, 2002-2015, Tyler M. Gingrich

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

This investigation examined the frequency and spatial pattern of lightning in the continental United States from 2002 to 2015. Before analysis, flashes were grouped based on their El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phase and Spatial Synoptic Classification (SSC) type for the winter season (December, January, and February). The purpose of this study is to better understand the relationship between planetary teleconnections, synoptic scale air masses, and micro scale phenomena, specifically lightning, in the continental United States. Evidence suggests ENSO cold phase flashes tend to have a lower frequency in number of flashes and flash days, as well as a northward …

Building Adaptive Capacity In Tribal Communities Of The Missouri River Basin To Manage Drought And Climate Extremes: A Case Study From The Wind River Indian Reservation, Crystal J. Stiles, Natalie Umphlett, Mitch Cottenoir

High Plains Regional Climate Center: Staff Publications

Native American peoples of the Northern and Central Plains have long endured harsh climate conditions, such as floods and droughts, and they possess valuable traditional knowledges that have enhanced their resilience to these extreme events. However, in recent times, limited capacity to adapt to a rapidly changing climate combined with a lack of resources have increased tribes’ vulnerability to climate extremes and their associated impacts. In response, a number of projects have been developed to assist tribes with their self-identified climate- and drought-related needs, particularly in the context of on-reservation decision-making. In this case study, we present an engagement strategy …

The Rapid Weakening Of Hurricane Fred (2009), Christina Talamo

Atmospheric & Environmental Sciences

This research project discusses the rapid weakening of Hurricane Fred, a major Category 3 hurricane that occurred in the Atlantic basin during the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season. Between the days of 9 September and 13 September, Fred remained stationary off the coast of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean and never made landfall, all the while consistently weakening over open ocean from a major Category 3 hurricane to a tropical storm. In the Atlantic basin, I will define the rapid weakening, or RW, of a tropical cyclone as a decrease in the storm’s maximum sustained winds by 10.3 m s⁻¹ in …

Examining Terrain Effects On Upstate New York Tornado Events Utilizing High-Resolution Model Simulations, Luke Lebel

Atmospheric & Environmental Sciences

The region at the intersection of the Mohawk and Hudson valleys of New York is characterized by complex terrain. It has been hypothesized that this complex terrain may have an impact on the development and evolution of severe convection in the region. Specifically, previous research has hypothesized that terrain-channeled flow in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys contributed to increased low-level wind shear and instability in the valleys during past severe weather outbreaks. However, a lack of observations in the region prevented this hypothesis from being robustly tested.

The goal of this study is to further examine this hypothesis and complement …

High-Resolution Simulation Of A Tornado In Bangladesh On 13 May 1996, Katherine Hollinger

Atmospheric & Environmental Sciences

The country of Bangladesh has been known to experience some of the deadliest tornado outbreaks in the world. The severe weather season in this region only spans from late March to early May, but can produce significant severe weather outbreaks in that short time. Even with these outbreaks occurring, there has not been extensive analysis completed to evaluate the environmental parameters on these tornado event days in this region.

The goal of this project is to use a Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model simulation to evaluate a significant tornado that occurred in the Tangail and Jamalpur districts in Bangladesh …

Climate From The Mcmurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, 1986–2017: Surface Air Temperature Trends And Redefined Summer Season, Maciej K. Obryk, Peter T. Doran, Andrew G. Fountain, M. Myers, Christopher P. Mckay

Geology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The weather of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, the largest ice‐free region of the Antarctica, has been continuously monitored since 1985 with currently 14 operational meteorological stations distributed throughout the valleys. Because climate is based on a 30‐year record of weather, this is the first study to truly define the contemporary climate of the McMurdo Dry Valleys. Mean air temperature and solar radiation based on all stations were −20°C and 102 Wm⁻², respectively. Depending on the site location, the mean annual air temperatures on the valleys floors ranged between −15°C and −30°C, and mean annual solar radiation varied …

Evidence For Horizontal Blocking And Reflection Of A Small-Scale Gravity Wave In The Mesosphere, N. R. Criddle, C. Heale, J. Snively, P. -D. Pautet, T. Yuan, Y. Zhao, M. J. Taylor

Publications

The variations of the horizontal phase velocity of an internal gravity wave, generated by wave “blocking” or “reflection” due to an inhomogeneous wind field, have been predicted theoretically and numerically investigated but had yet to be captured experimentally. In this paper, through a collaborative observation campaign using a sodium (Na) Temperature/Wind lidar and a collocated Advanced Mesospheric Temperature Mapper (AMTM) at Utah State University (USU), we report the first potential evidence of such a unique gravity wave process. The study shows that a small-scale wave, captured by the AMTM, with initial observed horizontal phase velocity of 37 ± 5 m/s …

An Atmospheric And Spatiotemporal Examination Of Lightning-Initiated Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes Detected By The Fermi Satellite And Tetra Ii, Deirdre Colleen Smith

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs) are sub-millisecond bursts of the highest naturally occurring light-energy found within Earth’s atmosphere. TGFs are associated with the electric fields produced in thunderstorms and are geolocated by coincident sferics from lightning strokes. Though billions of lightning strokes occur globally each year, fewer than 1,000 TGFs are detected via satellite and ground-based sensors and only a small fraction are geolocated via sferics.

To date, few studies have focused on individual thunderstorms and climates that produce TGFs. This dissertation examines TGFs from two differing data samples: 1) NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Burst Monitor (2013-2018) and 2) The TGF and …

Learning Set Representations For Lwir In-Scene Atmospheric Compensation, Nicholas M. Westing, Kevin C. Gross, Brett J. Borghetti, Jacob A. Martin, Joseph Meola

Faculty Publications

Atmospheric compensation of long-wave infrared (LWIR) hyperspectral imagery is investigated in this article using set representations learned by a neural network. This approach relies on synthetic at-sensor radiance data derived from collected radiosondes and a diverse database of measured emissivity spectra sampled at a range of surface temperatures. The network loss function relies on LWIR radiative transfer equations to update model parameters. Atmospheric predictions are made on a set of diverse pixels extracted from the scene, without knowledge of blackbody pixels or pixel temperatures. The network architecture utilizes permutation-invariant layers to predict a set representation, similar to the work performed …

Sulfur Dioxide From The Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment Satellite, Doug Cameron

College of Sciences Posters

The version 4.0 dataset from the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment – Fourier Transform Spectrometer (ACE-FTS) on SCISAT, released in March of 2019, has sulfur dioxide (SO₂) volume mixing ratio (VMR) profiles as a routine data product. From this dataset, global SO₂ distributions between the altitudes of 10.5 km and 23.5 km are analyzed. The global distribution of all SO₂ VMR data by altitude is broken down into 30° and 5° latitude zones. Seasonality of the global SO₂ distribution is explored. Volcanic SO₂ plumes are isolated in the dataset and compared with extinction data from the …

Atmospheric Contrail Detection With A Deep Learning Algorithm, Nasir Siddiqui

Student Research, Papers, and Creative Works

Aircraft contrail emission is widely believed to be a contributing factor to global climate change. We have used machine learning techniques on images containing contrails in hopes of being able to identify those which contain contrails and those that do not. The developed algorithm processes data on contrail characteristics as captured by long-term image records. Images collected by the United States Deparment of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Management user facility(ARM) were used to train a deep convolutional neural network for the purpose of this contrail classification. The neural network model was trained with 1600 images taken by the Total Sky Imager(TSI) …

Droughtscape, Spring 2020, National Drought Mitigation Center

DroughtScape: Quarterly Newsletter of the National Drought Mitigation Center (2007–2023)

DroughtScape, Spring 2020

Surviving Under The Reign Of El Niño Southern Oscillation: An Analysis Of The Effects Of Extreme El Niño Events On The Oceanographic And Biological Environment Of The Galápagos Islands, Ava Mcilvaine

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is commonly known as the atmospheric and oceanographic powerhouse of the Southern Pacific Ocean. From phytoplankton to apex predators, ENSO controls the stability of species’ populations within this biodiverse ocean environment. El Niño’s 9-15 month alteration of the heat storage in the tropical Pacific drastically shifts the temperature, nutrient, and circulation gradient its marine life is accustomed to. A single degree change in the ocean’s surface layer temperature can have large consequences for marine species, and El Niño is commonly associated with Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies (SSTAs) between 2°- 6° Celsius. The potential danger El …

Trend Analyses Of The Abundances Of Atmospheric Molecules, Anton Fernando

Physics Theses & Dissertations

A new line list for the A³Π - X³Σ- electronic transition of NH has been prepared using line positions from the literature and calculated line intensities. High level ab initio calculations were performed with the MOLPRO program to obtain the A - X transition dipole moment function. Potential energy curves and line strengths were calculated with Le Roy's RKR1 and LEVEL programs. Line intensities and Einstein A values were calculated with Western's PGOPHER program after converting the Hund's case (b) output of LEVEL to Hund's case (a) input needed for PGOPHER. The Herman- Wallis effect is …