ECE Seminar: Jason Horne "How Well Can High-Resolution Numerical Weather Models Simulate Urban Near-Surface Environments?"

Content

Abstract:

Understanding and modeling conditions at the neighborhood scale is essential for addressing weather and climate impacts on both infrastructure and marginalized and vulnerable communities. Mesoscale weather models provide information at horizontal resolutions of a few kilometers. These resolutions are still too coarse to represent environmental conditions at neighborhood scales of tens of meters or smaller, as experienced by individual residents. In contrast, microscale urban simulations are often limited by stationary boundary conditions from mesoscale weather models and relatively small spatial extents. I evaluate a dynamic downscaling approach that bridges mesoscale and neighborhood scales using multi-nested WRF-LES model simulations. The simulation incorporates recently developed or updated static data to represent Baltimore, MD's unique urban environment. I assess model performance using remote sensing, surface weather, surface flux, soil, biophysical, and boundary-layer profile observations from the Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative (BSEC) and the Coastal Urban-Rural Atmospheric Gradient Experiment (CoURAGE). Overall, in this talk, I will share lessons learned from our model development and validation efforts, which contribute to the ongoing effort to improve urban modeling across scales.

Bio:

Jason is a postdoctoral scholar on the PCAR team with an interdisciplinary background spanning the biological, hydrologic, and atmospheric sciences. Using his expertise in measuring and modeling atmospheric turbulence, he works on topics such as modeling turbulent pressure spectra for infrasound detection and, more broadly, the interplay of pressure and turbulence in the boundary layer, with a particular interest in the impacts of surface heterogeneity.