Climate Downscaling
Current climate models are unable to resolve temperature variations that occur over fine spatial scales (<1 km). Understanding these variations are important to a number of applications, including the improvement of weather forecast models and understanding how endangered species will respond to climate change. Recent work has entailed analyzing data from a network of 60+ temperature sensors currently deployed along east- and west-facing slopes in the Blue Ridge Mountains and relating these measurements to long-term observations from Pinnacles.
Carbon Dioxide Variability in Mountainous Terrain
Carbon dioxide measurements from a network of tall towers throughout the United States are used in a variety of global carbon models. These measurements are used because they typically from the mixed layer and are thus representative of a large spatial scale. However, there has been little work to understand how these measurements compare with those made at mountaintop sites, such as Pinnacles. Results from Temple Lee’s M.S. thesis show that carbon dioxide variations are largest on fair weather days and during cold front passages. We are currently investigating the utility of these measurements in inversion models such as CarbonTracker. Ultimately, we will use WRF, a high-resolution meteorological model, coupled with a particle dispersion model to determine the concentration footprint of Pinnacles so that mountaintop carbon dioxide measurements may be more readily used in inversion systems.
Planetary Boundary Layer Depth and Aerosol Concentrations
Analyses of diurnal variability in the depth of the convective boundary layer (CBL) over flat, homogeneous terrain have shown that it increases during clear days, resulting in increased amounts of particulate dispersion. However, few studies have been conducted in mountainous areas. To this end, we are using a suite of meteorological instruments, a LIDAR, and a series of field experiments, to better understand the spatial and temporal evolution of the CBL in complex terrain.