NG001
40 Years of Atmospheric Scaling: From Cloud Areas and Perimeters to the Climate
Session ID#: 161864
Session Description:
Forty years ago, fractal concepts combined with satellite radiances and radar reflectivities showed that the atmosphere was scaling over a wide range of scales, including the mesoscale [Lovejoy, 1982]. It marked the rebirth of a scaling paradigm implicit in Richardson's [1926] "4/3" law of turbulent diffusion, a precursor of Kolmogorov's [1942] "5/3" law. Richardson claimed his law held from planetary to centimetric scales, and he famously tested it with an assortment of premodern data, including floating parsnips. This year is also the centenary of another Richardson scaling idea: turbulent cascades that, in 1983, spawned multifractals and Generalized Scale Invariance: the frameworks necessary for dealing respectively with scaling fields and scaling stratification.
Wide-range atmospheric scaling is a symmetry principle on par with energy conservation. It has fundamental implications for numerical modeling of weather and climate, for hydrological systems, for new methods of data analysis, for the development new stochastic spatial, temporal and space-time models of the atmosphere, including direct macroweather modeling for long range weather forecasts and climate projections. As a new basis for classifying dynamical regimes, it changes the way we think about and understand the atmosphere.
We welcome contributions on any aspect of atmospheric scaling in space, time or space-time. Application areas include meteorology, hydrology, climatology, oceanography, and biogeophysics. The scaling of atmospheric boundary conditions, namely, topography and ocean, are also relevant and contributions are welcome.
Index Terms:
3310 Clouds and cloud feedbacks [ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES]
3360 Remote sensing [ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES]
4440 Fractals and multifractals [NONLINEAR GEOPHYSICS]
4475 Scaling: spatial and temporal [NONLINEAR GEOPHYSICS]
Primary Convener: Anthony B Davis, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, United States
Conveners: Ana Paula Barros, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Urbana, United States, Francois G Schmitt, CNRS, University of Lille, University of the Littoral Cote d’Opale, Laboratoire d’Océanologie et de Géosciences, Wimereux, France and Christian L. E. Franzke, Institute for Basic Science, Center for Climate Physics, Busan, South Korea
Student/Early Career Convener: Mikael Witte, Naval Postgraduate School, Meteorology, Monterey, CA, United States
The Ensemble Fractal Dimension of Clouds (1186978)
Thomas DeWitt1, Timothy J Garrett2, Steven K Krueger3, Karlie Rees4 and Corey Bois3, (1)University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, United States, (2)University of Utah, Atmospheric Science, Salt Lake City, United States, (3)University of Utah, Atmospheric Sciences, Salt Lake City, UT, United States, (4)University of Utah, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Salt Lake City, UT, United States
Scaling Analysis of the Global Surface Air Temperature (1135837)
Yang Gao1, Francois G Schmitt2, Jianyu Hu1 and Yongxiang Huang1, (1)State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science, College of Ocean and Earth Sciences, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China, (2)CNRS, Paris Cedex 16, France
Beyond Hasselmann and Leith: The Challenge of non-Markovian (and Fractional) Stochastic Climate Modelling (1148020)
Nicholas Wynn Watkins, University of Warwick, Physics, Coventry, United Kingdom, Raphael Calel, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, United States, Sandra C Chapman, University of Warwick, Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics, Department of Physics, Coventry, CV4, United Kingdom, Aleksei Chechkin, Akhiezer Institute of Theoretical Physics,, Kharkiv, Ukraine, Ian Ford, University College London, London, United Kingdom, Rainer Klages, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom and David Alan Stainforth, London School of Economics, GRI, London, United Kingdom
Acceleration statistics of snowflakes in a broad range of turbulence conditions (1165618)
Dhiraj Kumar Singh Sr1, Eric R Pardyjak1 and Timothy J Garrett2, (1)University of Utah, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Salt Lake City, United States, (2)University of Utah, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Salt Lake City, UT, United States
A Fractal Toy Model of Opaque Cumulus Clouds for Information Content Analysis in Optical Tomography, and Two Complementary Random Walk Processes Therein (1054844)
Anthony B Davis1 and Linda Forster1,2, (1)Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, United States, (2)Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Munich), Meteorological Institute, Munich, Germany
