Robert Jacob
Computational Climate Scientist Robert Jacob (EVS) will discuss his Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) sponsored work at the LDRD Seminar Series presentation Tuesday, July 11, 2017.
“Measuring and Modeling the Urban Boundary Layer” begins at 12:30 p.m. in the Bldg. 203 Auditorium. All are welcome to attend.
Abstract
Urban areas change their own climate most famously by creating an urban heat island and by altering the flow of air over, around, and through the city. They also emit pollutants that have strong negative local effects. All of these features are contained in the urban boundary layer, the least understood portion of the atmospheric boundary layer. To better predict urban weather and understand how climate change will affect, it will be necessary to better understand and model the interactions of each cities boundary layer with its surrounding regional climate. Models of urban areas suffer from a common problem: lack of validation data from within the city. Most climatological and meteorological sensor networks are located outside urban areas to better sample larger regions. They also have not taken advantage of low-cost compute and sensor devices such as have been developed by the commercial cell phone industry. In partnership with other LDRD projects, we developed a prototype-sensing device that included on-board compute, storage and networking and deployed it on rooftops at Argonne and in the city. This prototype informed development of the Waggle platform currently being used in the Array of Things project.
Biography
Robert Jacob is a computational climate scientist in the Environmental Science Division. He is also a senior fellow in the Argonne-University of Chicago Computation Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and there created one of the first parallel climate models, the Fast Ocean Atmosphere Model (FOAM). Prior to joining Argonne, Jacob was a postdoc at the University of Chicago where FOAM was applied to problems in deep-time paleoclimate. In his first project at Argonne, he co-developed the Model Coupling Toolkit, a flexible library for building parallel-coupled models which is still the foundation of couplers in leading global climate models in the U.S. and Europe. He currently co-leads the software engineering group in the U.S. Department of Energy’s multi-institution Accelerated Climate Model for Energy project. Jacob’s current interests include high-performance computing applications to scientific problems, scientific programming, urban weather and climate, and long-term climate variability.