麻豆传媒

Research Interests
As part of the Boundary Layer Meteorology and Renewable Energy Groups at ASRC, my main research focus is on renewable energy and atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) processes. This includes work on improving wind and solar power production forecasting, outage prediction modeling applications, developing instrumentation and improving modeling approaches for offshore wind energy, and using ASRC modeling and observational assets to better understand weather and climate influences on our renewable energy resource. A principal tool for my observational work is a Leosphere Windcube 100S scanning LiDAR. Of great value for my research is continuing collaboration with colleagues at ASRC, the New York State Mesonet, the Center of Excellence for Weather and Climate Analytics, and working with a very talented group of graduate students.

My previous work in the private sector (with Atmospheric Information Services and Envirolaw, companies I founded, and AWS Truepower, as Lead Research Scientist) included serving as a lead Principal Investigator for the first Wind Forecasting Improvement Project (WFIP), a three-year Department of Energy (DOE)/National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) study to demonstrate the value of additional atmospheric observations and model enhancements on wind energy production forecasts, the development of the Solar Wind Integrated Forecast Tool (SWIFT), a state-of-the-art forecasting service for Hawaii麓s electric utilities, and a LiDAR-based study of the 3D wind field over Cranberry Lake in New York鈥檚 Adirondack Mountains, and developing an early roadmap for the legal and regulatory review of offshore wind energy projects in US coastal waters.

Research Interests
Solar Energy Resource assessment

Because the weather is the main driver of solar energy technologies, it is important to characterize and to quantify the influences of climate and weather on the solar resource. We have developed approaches to utilize the imagery from weather satellites to infer the amount of solar energy available at any point in time and space. We have used this capability to produce solar resource maps for the US and several other countries, and to provide operational data for solar system output quality control.

Evaluating the impact of solar energy systems on utility power grids

The resource information developed above can be used effectively to simulate the operation of solar power plants and to gauge their impact on utility grids' power flow. An important application of this is to detect, quantify and monitor the capability of dispersed photovoltaic systems to help utilities meet their peak demand requirements and to minimize the risks of power outages.

 

Introduction

My research interests are in past, current and future climate change in the tropics. I am particularly interested in trying to bridge the gap between modern climate dynamics studies and paleoclimatic interpretation of proxy data. Therefore my research is very interdisciplinary in nature and often forms part of larger international collaborative programs. In my research I tend to focus on two regions in particular: the tropical and subtropical Andes in South America and the mountains of East Africa. In both locations a wealth of paleoclimatic information is available from a large number of natural archives, but the understanding of their climatic sensitivity is often inadequate. Some of the most important natural archives are based on stable isotopic proxies (e.g. tropical ice cores, speleothems or biomarkers in lake sediments), but it is often not clear what these proxies really record and what their climatic sensitivities are in both the time- and space domain. I try to investigate how these sensitivities may change in time as boundary conditions change and if lessons learned from climate studies on interannual to interdecadal timescales can be used in the interpretation of centennial to millennial scale climate variability recorded in these proxies. To answer some of these questions I employ both observational data (in-situ measurements, reanalysis, radiosonde and satellite data) and models of varying complexity (GCMs, RCMs and isotopic models). In the past this research has been funded through grants from NSF (Earth System History, Paleoclimate and Climate Dynamics) and NOAA (Climate Change Data and Detection, CCDD).

I also maintain an active research program studying the causes, impacts and scenarios of future climate change in the tropical Andes, where the retreat of glaciers may soon pose a threat for the regional water supply. I employ regional climate models (RCMs) over the tropical Andes to study how glacier extent and runoff from glacierized catchments will change under different scenarios as predicted in the IPCC-SRES (Special Report on Emissions Scenarios). This research is funded through NSF (co-funded by Hydrology and Climate Dynamics Divisions) and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI). I am also collaborating with the Latin America Division of the Word Bank, which has a particular interest in this kind of research and funding through the Global Environmental Fund (GEF) to implement adaptation measures in several Andean countries.

Research Interests

Climate variability and climate change in tropical South America and East Africa, tropical glacier-climate interactions, tropical paleoclimatology.