Clear Air Turbulence
This event - and others like it - are a strong reminder that we don't yet understand clear air turbulence nearly well enough. In this particular case, observational data revealed pronounced Horizontally-aligned Vortex Tubes (HVT). NCAR and NOAA researchers worked together to study the incident and using NOAA weather data, developed a very high resolution numerical model to see what a simulation might reveal. |
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| Jetstream and Air Parcels | Enstrophy | VS, VRMS and Enstrophy | ||
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The view is from the southwest with the Rocky Mountains in white, the jetstream in blue and fast-moving parcels of air in yellow. |
The yellow air parcels have been replaced by the enstrophy field in green. |
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In
December of 1992, a DC-8 cargo plane westbound out of Denver encountered
severe clear air turbulence. Despite losing an engine (far right
side) and 6 meters of wing the crew managed to land the plane safely.
| Domain | |
Subject: |
Turbulence |
Atmosphere Layer: |
Stratosphere |
Location: |
Boulder, Colorado USA |
| Horizontal Dimensions: |
48 km x 48 km |
| Vertical Dimensions: |
13.35 km |
Horizontal Resolution: |
30 m |
Vertical Resolution: |
72 levels, irregularly spaced |
| Data & Model | |
Model Name: |
Clark Model |
Dataset: |
Landsat Thematic Mapper |
Data Size: |
1 TB raw, 128 GB byte-scaled, resampled and subsetted to about 10GB in a working set. |
Variables Visualized: |
Jetstream, fast-moving air parcels, enstrophy, VS, VRMS |
Start: |
December, 1992 |
Time Evolution: |
Subsetted to ~27 min, raw data ~6 hours |
Time Resolution: |
7.5 seconds |
Timesteps: |
219 in subset, ~2800 in overall dataset |
Hardware: |
Cray J/932 |
CPU Time: |
1500 hours |
Creation Software: |
POV raytracer, Vis5D |
| Research Project | |
Scientific Credit : |
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Visualization Credit : |
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Date Catalogued: |
2002-08-05 |
Rights: |
© 2002, UCAR, All rights reserved. |
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