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Announced on: Thursday, Apr. 03, 2025
ERTH Seminar Series April 3rd, Thursday, 1 – 2pm SCI 244 Dr. Holly J. Oldroyd Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Davis Terrain Impacts on Mountain Winds and Turbulent Transport Turbulent land-water-atmosphere interactions describe how landscape conditions—such as roughness, temperature, and moisture—affect the atmosphere, and vice versa, through fluxes of momentum, heat, latent heat, CO₂, and other scalars. These interactions are crucial for meteorology and hydrology, playing an important role in applications like wildfire risk assessment, flood prediction, chemical transport modeling, forest management, agriculture, water resources management, and infrastructure planning In this talk, I will provide an overview of the challenges, recent insights, and open questions related to near-surface turbulent transport in mountainous environments. The primary focus will be on katabatic flows—downslope winds driven by negative buoyancy—which are common over slopes. These flows exhibit unique thermodynamic and airflow dynamics that significantly influence turbulence, its generation and suppression, and the associated fluxes, in contrast to those observed over flat terrain. This is particularly important because state-of-the-art weather, climate, hydrologic, and remote sensing models rely on empirically derived surface-atmosphere exchange parameterizations (wall models) based on observations from flat, homogeneous terrain. To improve simulations for mountainous regions, we use our observations to develop and test new wall models and turbulence parameterizations, while gaining insights into fundamental transport processes. Finally, I will introduce some of our recent and ongoing research, including studies of transport processes in forest canopies over slopes, greenhouse gas fluxes from reservoirs, and advection processes affecting evapotranspiration in heterogeneous agricultural landscapes.
Accessibility Information: Persons with disabilities who need accommodations or have questions about physical access may call the program sponsoring the event or call Accessibility Resource Center at 530-898-5959.
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