Sue Ellen Haupt - US grants

The goal of this research is to study coherent structures in geophysical flow by determining equilibrium solutions of the quasigeostrophic vorticity equation. The system of equations is solved numerically using the Newton-Kantorovich algorithm and the stability properties of the solutions analyzed using both time integration studies and a dynamical systems approach. The results of this work will be applied to the phenomenon of atmospheric blocking, that is, the situation in which the planetary scale waves of the atmosphere maintain a stable configuration which causes weather patterns to persist for weeks at a time. Modeling of the blocking process will examine the generation, maintenance, and decay of the blocks. This research has obvious implications for improving medium range weather forecasting. The PI is well qualified for this project. She is an applied mathematician with background in fluid mechanics and atmospheric and oceanographic sciences. This award is being made as a Research Initiation Award and is jointly funded by the Large-scale Dynamic Meteorology and Applied Mathematics Programs.

ATM-9312760 Haupt, Sue Ellen University of Colorado, Boulder Title: Inverse Models and Orthogonal Decompositions in Geophysical Flow The purpose of this project is to simultaneously apply proper orthogonal decomposition and linear inverse methods to produce simple, easy-to-run, fast models which reproduce the statistics of more complicated models. First, a linear inverse model based on the empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs) of a series of runs of the Shallow Water Equations (SWE) will be developed. The SWE were chosen for ease of comparison with previous and ongoing studies. This simple inverse model will include the EOFs, their tendencies, and statistical noise. EOFs will then be used to construct an inverse model of the Community Climate Model of NCAR. Such an inverse model has not yet been applied to climate models to our knowledge. Thus a simple (fast, easy-to-run) climate model with statistics identical to the full climate model on which it was based will be constructed. Such a model will be useful for instances where the statistics need be to reproduced, but for which the exact time development is not essential. Various sensitivity analyses will be performed to determine the best methods to construct these models. This line of research will lead to a new method to decrease the number of degrees of freedom necessary to obtain adequate resolution in some geophysical models. In addition, it will give new insight into the interactions of the empirical modes of motion. This work is preliminary to developing s fully nonlinear climate model based on orthogonal projections. It is important because it would facilitate the testing of climate hypotheses which require credible but simple (computationally cheap) climate models. This research is funded under the NSF USGCRP CMAP program.

Engineering - Other (59)
Our project addresses issues in undergraduate education at research universities highlighted in the 1998 Boyer Commission Report. Our aim is to incorporate advances in information technology into the curriculum, and is consistent with recent increased emphasis in the applied areas of information technology by the National Science Foundation. This has been accomplished by developing an option to the department's undergraduate Mechanical Engineering degree in the area of Computational Engineering. We have worked with faculty from the Engineering Research Center at Mississippi State University to adapt the curricula from their undergraduate minor in Computational Engineering to our Utah State University program. We have also built a PC Beowulf cluster consisting of 5 server and 20 compute nodes to support the Computational Engineering option. This will be accomplished by adopting a cluster design process developed at the University of Kentucky. Undergraduate students are being exposed to cluster designs and programming models through a week long seminar, which will be offered on a yearly basis. Results of our efforts will be disseminated through the national ASEE conference and through publication in an engineering education journal. In addition, materials from the cluster workshop will be made available through our Department's website.