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Dan Zumpfe     INSCC 480-7     (801) 585-1407

Graduate Research Assistant - Department of Meteorology - University of Utah

NOAA Cooperative Institute for Regional Prediction

 

My Research


(April 19, 2004)

Today I successfully defended my MS thesis entitled "A Case Study of a Strong Lake-breeze Front in the Salt Lake Valley".  The paper itself must go through revisions before I will be able to submit it to the thesis editor.  The current draft is 70 pages and could grow before publishing in June with some added content and figures.  I will condense my thesis research into a preprint that will be presented orally at the 11th Conference on Mountain Meteorology (AMS) in Bartlett, NH.  As soon as the preprint and thesis are completed, I will post them on the 'Experience' page.

(November 13, 2003)

Work on my MS thesis has begun.  I have decided to perform an observational study of a lake breeze during the Vertical Transport and Mixing Experiment (VTMX) of October 2000.  I have several possible days to analyze, though it is currently unclear what day or Intensive Observation Period (IOP) I might find the most useful data.  In the near future, I will be posting some more specifics about my findings.  Some of the questions to be answered by this thesis research include:

    1) at what speed does the lake-breeze front propagate southward through the Salt Lake Valley from the Great Salt Lake to the Jordan Narrows?

    2) how does the lake-breeze circulation affect the evolution of the boundary layer in the Salt Lake Valley?

    3) what effect does the thermally driven upslope flow have on the speed or propagation of the lake-breeze front?

    4) what criteria must be satisfied to confirm that the lake-breeze front has passed a given surface observation site?

    5) what synoptic conditions are present during the lake breeze event?

    6) why should anyone care whether or not a lake breeze occurs?

...more questions and updates will be posted soon...

(January 25, 2003)

 

Problem - Using data gathered from the Vertical Transport and Mixing Experiment (VTMX) of October 2000, identify the days, if any, where a lake breeze originating from the Great Salt Lake moved through the Salt Lake Valley.  If lake breezes are found on any of the IOP’s, did they reverse the mountain valley circulation before daytime heating?  If there is sufficient evidence that these fronts reversed mountain-valley flow to valley-mountain flow before daytime heating on these IOP’s, use radar, surface observations, and sounding data to trace lake breeze movement.


Results - Use the following link to view the slideshow presentation.  Note you must use Internet Explorer or Powerpoint to the view the show.