Lecture series in Ecology and Environmental Research WS 2019/20

Inside the fog: towards an improved forecasting of nocturnal fog by using turbulence-resolving simulations

Fog as a meteorological phenomenon can have a high impact on the economy but also on personal safety. The estimated total economic losses associated with fog events on aviation, marine and land transportation to be comparable to those of winter storms.
There is thus increasing demand for precise fog forecasting. Despite the improvements in numerical weather prediction models over recent years, accurate forecasting of fog is still challenging. The main reason is fog’s considerable variability in space and time as a result of the nonlinear interaction between several processes, such as radiation, turbulent mixing, cloud microphysics, and energy transfer in the atmosphere–surface–soil continuum. Turbulence-resolving simulations (so-called
large-eddy simulations, LES) provide an ideal framework for studying these processes and their interaction.
This talk provides an introduction into the fog physics and its life cycle and outline recent advancements in fog research using high-resolution LES at Leibniz University Hannover.

Invited by Christoph Thomas, Micrometeorology

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