Design and impacts of small dams/Toward improved representations of clouds in models: Observations and simulations

Design and impacts of small dams

Dams have historically played significant roles in the development and advancement of civilizations. But humans have complex relationships with these engineering feats because of their large environmental, societal, economic, and political impacts. In this presentation, I'll introduce various types of dams, both man-made and natural, and discuss their significance for climate systems, societies, and geopolitics. I'll also briefly introduce the process of designing a small earth-embankment dam.

Toward improved representations of clouds in models: Observations and simulations

Clouds play crucial roles in the atmosphere by impacting the radiative balance and producing precipitation. Varying properties of clouds often lead to varying radiative and precipitation properties of clouds, and the modeling community makes continuous efforts to represent cloud microphysical processes well in models. Simulating clouds with particle-tracking Lagrangian models has recently been a powerful method for modeling microphysical processes more realistically at a higher computational cost. The current work focuses on the observations and Lagrangian modeling of convective clouds over the southeast Texas where the TRACER field campaign took place in 2021-2022. Convective clouds develop almost daily in the area while impacted by the urban heat island effect, land/sea breeze, synoptic-scale flows, and local pollutions from the adjacent areas. All these factors simultaneously contribute to changing precipitation properties of convective clouds in a complex manner. This work aims to understand the aerosol and dynamical conditions under which convective clouds tend to produce more rainfall in the region. In addition to this ongoing work, some examples of aircraft-based in-situ observations of clouds are introduced in the talk.