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Tina Chow
PEG SKORPINSKI PHOTO
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New CEE professor Chow goes with the atmospheric flow
As anyone who has lived in the Bay Area knows, techniques used to forecast the weather are less than perfect. But researchers like Berkeley CEE professor Tina Chow are working to fill the gaps.
Chow joined the Berkeley faculty last July, following a year of postdoctoral research in the atmospheric science division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Her research in environmental fluid mechanics uses the same kind of forecasting models the weather channel uses. These are computer simulations that predict meteorological properties like atmospheric pressure, temperature and wind speed. Chow’s goal is to reach a deeper understanding of, and better prediction methods for, atmospheric flow over both natural and manmade terrain.
“I work on improving the algorithms that go into those models so that the forecasts can be more accurate,” says Chow, who has a bachelor’s from Harvard and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford in environmental fluid mechanics and hydrology.
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CEE professor Tina Chow created simulations of flow in the atmospheric boundary layer of Switzerland’s Riviera Valley (top). Color contours show simulated wind speed along the valley axis in meters per second (bottom). Red areas indicate flow moving up the valley, away from the observer, and blue indicates flow moving down.
GRAPHIC COURTESY TINA CHOW
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Chow’s focus is the atmospheric boundary layer, the region extending about a mile above the surface that most affects life on Earth. She has studied a range of environments, from California’s Owens Valley in the Sierra Nevada to the Riviera Valley in the Swiss Alps, as well as urban settings like Oklahoma City. Faster computers are yielding higher-resolution forecasts, Chow says, but this sometimes makes it more difficult to predict the detailed air flow because the resolution reveals variations in the terrain, whether mountains or skyscrapers, that affect the movement of air over the Earth’s surface.
“Solutions for the equations that govern fluid dynamics are developed in idealized worlds,” she says. “But when you do environmental flow, you have rough terrain. Buildings, trees, fields and roads have to be accounted for.”
The research has the potential to yield new information about what causes bad air pollution days in basins and valleys, for example, and to improve the accuracy of weather forecasts in complex urban areas, especially in cities with microclimates like San Francisco. It could provide valuable insight about how materials are transported in the atmosphere, like plumes of environmental contaminants, and help predict the effects of emissions from vehicle traffic.
“We’d like to be able to predict in real time the dispersion of contaminants, either accidental or intentional releases, so that the effects might be controlled,” Chow says. “If we can get the flow model correct, the list of applications beyond weather forecasting becomes huge.”
Go to www.ce.berkeley.edu/~chow for more information on Chow and her research.
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