New Grant Award in the Group

Grant Type: SBU/BNL Seed Grant

PI (SBU): Foluso Ladeinde
PI (BNL): Yangang Liu
Co-PI (BNL): Vanessa Lopez-Marrero

Award Number: 94508
Project Number: 1175812
Task Number: 1
Title: A Novel Approach to Model Turbulent Aerosol Cloud Interactions and Implications for Climate Change Studies
Project Duration: July 1, 2022 – December 31, 2023
Project Phrase: Using high performance computing to analyze the turbulent interactions between aerosol and cloud, with a view to determining the implications for climate studies.

Project Abstract: 
 Understanding aerosol-cloud-interactions and adequately representing them in weather and climate models pose daunting challenges to atmospheric and computational sciences alike. A significant knowledge gap exists for the vital processes that occur at spatial scales smaller than the typical grid sizes of large eddy simulation (LES) model (e.g., 100 meters) in turbulent clouds, including, but not limited to, cloud and aerosol microphysics, turbulent entrainment-mixing between clouds and environmental air, and turbulence-cloud-aerosol interactions. These processes are either not represented at all or are represented rudimentarily in the major types of models, such as global climate models (GCMs), numerical weather prediction (NWP), and LES models. To address the challenges at the most fundamental level, we propose to develop a cross-cutting particle-based direct numerical simulation (DNS) model that resolves the smallest turbulent eddies in the cloud, tracks physical evolution of individual cloud and aerosol particles, and covers a domain comparable to LES grid size. Cloud and aerosol number densities and their particle size spectra are among the various parameters of the problem. The comparative effects of different sources of aerosol (for example, fossil fuels, biomass, vegetation) will also be investigated. The implications for weather and climate change will be investigated.