Dao Wang, “Studying and Modeling the Long-Range Transport of Air Parcels Arriving at Mexican Gulf Coast Cities”
Mentor: Jonathan Kahl, Atmospheric Science
Acid rain can damage cultural heritage, including pre-Hispanic archaeological sites in Mexico. Over the past few decades, acid rain measurements have been made at several locations in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. With atmospheric trajectory analysis we can trace pollution movement over long distances, with the goal of helping to reduce its environmental impact. In 2007 a detailed analysis of wind flow, identifying potential pollution sources, was conducted for one of the Veracruz sites. With recent meteorological advances, the resolution for the meteorological data used in atmospheric trajectory models has improved from 250km in 2007 to 12km today. The goal of this study is to use the higher-resolution data to see whether air flow patterns are different for the different acid rain measurement sites in Veracruz.
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Hi Dao – very interesting work! Thank you for sharing. I’m curious to know if you computed the absolute horizontal path length for the trajectories at each of your sites, or if there are directions from which trajectories most commonly arrive at each of your sites? It looks like a lot of them may come from the east, which makes sense given the prevailing winds there (especially in summer), but I’m guessing there are many more trajectories than can easily be shown?
Hi, Prof. Evans.
This research project focus on the atmospheric transport length differences in horizontal and vertical compare to the Kahl, 2007’s research paper. While the direction of the atmospheric transport(bearing) is on a difference project that we are still working on it.
Thanks.
Hi everyone! I’m Dao Wang, and I really enjoy doing this project, if you have any questions or comments please let me know!!
Hi Dao,
I enjoyed learning about this very much. Am I understanding correctly that the work you have done could help mitigate acid rain damage because we would be able to determine likely seasonal source-points for air-borne pollutants? And, if we know the trajectories of the pollution, we could intervene at the source-points? If all that is true, would we also need to overlay this data on the seasonality of rain? I’m thinking wind is only part of the problem, right? Forgive me if I have misunderstood!
Thank you for the informative work!
Hi Prof. Rothfels,
By knowing the air movements and trajectories, one of the obvious applications is to overlay with the Gulf of Mexico’s off-shore oil rigs. With that we can observe if the acid rain are cause by these emissions. With all the knowledge I done in this research, the wind and atmospheric movement are the only cause as your question suggested. But we cannot conclude in that way, as to figure that out more research needs to be done.
Thanks,
Dao Wang