Twelve typical wintertime wind patterns for the Grand Canyon region were derived from a two-stage cluster analysis wind-field classification scheme. The wind measurements were collected by a surface network of 15 stations deployed for a period of approximately three months. The wind patterns are strongly influenced by the complex terrain of the region. The analyses relate the wind patterns to m...

Diurnal mountain wind systems are local thermally driven wind systems that form over mountainous terrain and are produced by the buoyancy effects associated with the diurnal cycle of heating and cooling of the lower atmospheric layers. This chapter reviews the present scientific understanding of diurnal mountain wind systems, focusing on research findings published since 1988. Slope flows are e...

The numerical simulation of flows over large-scale wind turbine blades without considering the transition from laminar to fully turbulent flow may result in incorrect estimates of the blade loads and performance. Thanks to its relative simplicity and promising results, the Local-Correlation based Transition Modelling concept represents a valid way to include transitional effects into practical ...

The high cost of wind tunnel testing and the ongoing reduction in national wind tunnel facilities are forcing the aerospace engineering community to increasingly rely on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to predict the performance of new aircraft designs. However, most aerospace applications are characterized by flows that exhibit large-scale unsteady turbulence and the accurate prediction of ...

We study the Casimir force on a single surface immersed in an inhomoge-neous medium. Specifically we study the vacuum fluctuations of a scalar field with a spatially varying squared mass, m 2 + λ∆(x − a) + V (x), where V is a smooth potential and ∆(x) is a unit-area function sharply peaked around x = 0. ∆(x − a) represents a semi-penetrable thin plate placed at x = a. In the limits {∆(x−a) → δ(...

Recent work has produced a theory for tropical convective available potential energy (CAPE) that highlights the Clausius-Clapeyron (CC) scaling of the atmosphere’s saturation deficit as a driver of increases in CAPE with warming. Here we test this so-called “zero-buoyancy” theory for CAPE by modulating the saturation deficit of cloud-resolving simulations of radiative-convective equilibrium in ...

Any non-spherical distribution of density inside planets and stars gives rise to a non-spherical external gravity and change of shape. If part or all of the observed zonal flows at the cloud deck of Jupiter and Saturn represent deep interior dynamics, then the density perturbations associated with the deep zonal flows could generate gravitational signals detectable by the Juno mission and the C...

Thin film flows naturally arise in a wide variety of industrial and environmental problems ranging from microchip manufacturing, structured packing to lava flows in geology. In particular, wind-driven flows of liquid films are of great interests for deeper understanding of aircraft icing and better design of anti-icing and de-icing strategies. Currently, most thickness mapping techniques involv...

Computational wind engineering has progressed considerably in recent years. Along with the improved capability to simulate the small-scale flows around architectural structures there is a need to more realistically simulate the larger-scale atmospheric flows in which they are embedded. This would greatly expand the application of numerical models in areas of overlap between the disciplines of a...