Boundary layer circulations and turbulence in the North American monsoon
William Boos, Professor
Earth and Planetary Science
Closed. This professor is continuing with Spring 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Fall 2024.
The North American monsoon is a band of intense rainfall that stretches more than 1,000 km along Mexico's west coast and into the southwestern US, delivering crucial water supply to the semi-arid regions of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. This monsoon is a continental-scale atmospheric circulation that driven by fluxes of radiation over North America's high mountain areas, interacting with turbulence that is complicated by the phase changes of water in clouds. This project will use a set of advanced in situ observations collected during a two-year field campaign in the high-altitude Rocky Mountains, consisting of multi-band scanning radars, LIDAR, radiometers, instrumented balloons, and more. The project will use this instrument suite to understand how radiative heating of sloping mountain surfaces generates upward motion and interacts with boundary layer turbulence, collectively generating water vapor condensation and precipitation. The project will also analyze the atmospheric circulations that generated the floods of the extremely wet 2021-2022 monsoon seasons.
Role: This role will involve performing data analysis in a high-performance computing environment, most likely in a python/jupyter hub instance. As part of this effort, you will learn about boundary layer circulations, radiative heating, and the rotating fluid dynamics that govern Earth's atmospheric circulations; you will gain experience analyzing data from an advanced instrument suite of the Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program together with global gridded satellite datasets.
Qualifications: Experience performing data analysis with Python and working in a Linux/Unix environment; knowledge of vector calculus and introductory partial differential equations. Some exposure to fluid dynamics is helpful but not required.
Hours: 3-5 hrs
Related website: https://sail.lbl.gov/
Related website: https://boos.berkeley.edu/