Natural environment considerations for Space Shuttle system development support

: Current mission preparation and analysis methods place an undue burden of effort on conventional and special operations forces to effectively synchronize and execute their increasingly complex operational responsibilities in a rapidly changing global environment. This thesis developed a tool for the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) in support of their Mission Planning, Analysis, Rehearsal, and Execution (MPARE) initiative to allow special operations forces commanders and staffs to conduct mission planning and analysis in a distributed environment, and rapidly produce dynamic synchronization matrices and scheduling products. Operations research methods provide the foundation for the analysis. The system developed in this thesis is called the Special Operations Mission Planning and Analysis Support System (SOMPASS). SOMPASS is simple to learn and operate, provides dynamic changes with little effort, and is universal in application. This system has the capability to execute on any hardware platform, operate across any network connection, and expand easily to support additional users and requirements. This thesis provides not only a demonstration of capabilities through a special operations oriented illustrative scenario, but also a working product that can be adapted for use in mission planning and analysis by all units under USSOCOM.

Much attention has been given to the impact of environmental wind shear in the 850–200-hPa layer on tropical cyclones (TCs). However, even with the same magnitude of shear, helicity in this layer can vary significantly. A new parameter is presented, the tropical cyclone–relative environmental helicity (TCREH). Positive TCREH leads to a tilted storm that enhances local storm-scale helicity in regions of convection within the TC. This enhanced local-scale helicity potentially allows for more robust and longer-lasting convection, which is more effective at generating latent heat and subsequent TC intensification. TC vertical tilt is often attributed to wind shear. Different values of helicity modulate this tilt and certain tilt configurations are more favorable for development or intensification than others, suggesting that mean positive environmental helicity is more favorable for development and intensification than mean negative helicity. Idealized modeling simulations demonstrate the impact of environmental helicity on TC development and intensification. Results show that wind profiles with the same 850–200-hPa wind shear but different values of helicity lead to different rates of development. TCREH also is computed from the Interim ECMWF Re-Analysis (1979–2011) and Global Forecast System analyses (2004–11) to determine if a significant signal exists between TCREH and TC intensification. Mean annular helicity is averaged over various time periods and correlated with the TC intensity change during those periods. Results suggest a weak but statistically significant correlation between environmental helicity and TC intensity change with positive helicity being more favorable for intensification.

Transport properties in the stratosphere were measured in an experimental program where smoke trails, deposited by rockets and aircraft, were recorded by time-lapse photography. This allowed winds, wind shears, and the rate of dispersion of the smoke to be calculated. Radial growth of the trails conformed to a turbulent diffusion rate; the effective diffusion coefficient at 20 km was approximately 0.7 nr sec. The spatial turbulence structure was determined from measured wind shears. Average energy spectra were obtained for total vertical profiles and segmented profiles of horizontal winds. A consistent finding was that the energy spectrum dependence exponent was close to n = 2.8. In the case of segmented profile spectra we found that 20% of the sample population showed n < 2.2 (indicating an inertial subrange). This is consistent with the presence of intermittent thin layers of efficient mixing in the 5-18 km height range. We also found an increase of wind shear and amplitude with altitude in this region.

The most turbulent vortices that populate the forest-atmosphere interface have canopy height length scales. These vortices are mainly responsible for turbulent exchanges between inside and above canopy region. Thus, we used the vertical wind profiles obtained by 10 anemometers installed inside and above the forest canopy of the Rebio-Jarú experimental site, in the Amazon Rainforest. A third degree polynomial function was developed to better fit the wind profile and therefore estimate the inflection point height of the vertical wind profile (zi) a length scale associated with wind shear (Ls), and the wind speed at height zi. These length and velocity scales were used to obtain better fits for the dimensional wind profiles and turbulence statistical moments. Three dimensionless profile models were compared using friction velocity, wind velocity in zi and wind velocity at canopy height. It was observed that the dimensionless profiles using the velocity and shear calculated at zi provided support for the elaboration of more realistic parameterization of the turbulent exchange processes that occur both at the forest-atmosphere interface and inside the canopy.

Results are presented of wind profiles obtained between 80 and 150 km from five rocket launchings in 1968 and 1970 at Volgograd (48.7° N). E s layers were observed in three experiments at 100, 106 and 105 km respectively in agreement with the levels given by wind-shear theory to within the limits of observational accuracy.

During the 1998 Coqui 2 sounding rocket campaign, three chemical release rockets were launched from Puerto Rico to measure the wind profiles in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere region. The first release took place on February 19, and the next two releases were five days later and four hours apart. All three measurements show large winds and wind shears in the altitude range between 95 and 110 km. The largest wind speeds occurred near 100 km with horizontal flow velocities close to 150 m s−1. Taken in isolation, such features may appear to be unusual, but in fact, a large number of earlier rocket measurements show wind features similar to those observed in the Coqui 2 campaign. Such large winds are therefore not an isolated but rather a common feature of the wind profiles at midlatitudes in an altitude range that is critical for the electrodynamics of the ionosphere. The wind profile characteristics described here are not generally well known since the earlier more extensive chemical release data sets were only published in reports with a rather limited distribution.

A comprehensive planetary boundary-layer (PBL) and synoptic data set is used to isolate the mechanisms that determine the vertical shear of the horizontal wind in the convective mixed layer. To do this, we compare a fair-weather convective PBL with no vertical shear through the mixed layer (10 March 1992), with a day with substantial vertical shear in the north-south wind component (27 February). The approach involves evaluating the terms of the budget equations for the two components of the vertical shear of the horizontal wind; namely: the time-rate-of-change or time-tendency term, differential advection, the Coriolis terms (a thermal wind term and a shear term), and the second derivative of the vertical transport of horizontal momentum with respect to height (turbulent-transport term). The data, gathered during the 1992 STorm-scale Operational and Research Meteorology (STORM) Fronts Experiments Systems Test (FEST) field experiment, are from gust-probe aircraft horizontal legs and soundings, 915-MHz wind profilers, a 5-cm Doppler radar, radiosondes, and surface Portable Automated Mesonet (PAM) stations in a roughly 50 × 50 km boundary-layer array in north-eastern Kansas, nested in a mesoscale-to-synoptic array of radiosondes and surface data.

Wind is among the most important climatic elements. Its characteristics are determinant for a wide range of natural processes and human activities. However, ongoing climate change is modifying these characteristics, which may have important implications. Climatic changes on wind speed and direction, wind shear intensity, and helicity, over the 21st century and for 26 cities in the Iberian Peninsula, under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 anthropogenic forcing scenario, are assessed. For this purpose, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model was used, with initial and boundary conditions being obtained from simulations with the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology Earth System Model (MPI-ESM-LR) climate model and ERA-Interim reanalysis. Quantile-quantile bias correction was applied to the simulated data prior to subsequent analysis. Overall, the results hint at a reduction in the intensity of both near-surface and 850 hPa (approx. 5%) wind in the future. Nevertheless, for the 300 hPa level, a decrease in summertime wind speed is accompanied by a slight increase in the remaining months. Furthermore, significant increases in the number of occurrences of extreme wind events were also identified, mainly in northwestern Iberia. For wind shear, an intensity increase is projected throughout most of the year (approx. 5% in the upper quantiles), mainly in southwestern Iberia. Helicity is also projected to undergo a strengthening, mostly in summer months and over southwestern Iberia, with greater emphasis on events of longer duration and intensity. This study highlights some important projected changes in the wind structure and profile under future anthropogenic forcing. This knowledge may support decisions on climate change adaptation options and risk reduction of several major sectors, such as energy and aviation, thus deserving further research.

Based on one year gradient wind data and the wind data of a strong typhoon observed by three meteorological towers located on the coast and at the inshore sea, the underlying surfaces of the meteorological towers were classified and the roughness lengths were calculated quantitatively. On the basis of strong wind characteristic representative assessment and sample selection on the wind data of strong typhoon Hagupit, the gust factor variation characteristics of tropical cyclones under different underlying surfaces were analyzed. The observed fact and variation rule were found as follows: 1) The roughness lengths under neutral atmospheric condition which were calculated using logarithmic wind profile fitting based on the observation data can describe the slight change of the underlying surface objectively. 2) The gust factor of strong typhoon wind didn’t have variation trends with wind speed. But the variation amplitude of the gust factor was rather large over rough underlying surface which had pronounced effect on the numerical design of structural engineering. 3) The variation of the gust factor with height satisfied power law or logarithmic law. The power law fitting was more suitable for smooth underlying surface while the logarithmic fitting was better over rough underlying surface. 4) The observation data also suggested that the relationship between gust factor and roughness length can be described by power or linear equation. 5) The gust factor observed in this typhoon case was different from the gust factor recommended by WMO: The gust factor of the offshore wind came from rough underlying surface was higher than the value recommended by WMO while the gust factor of the onshore wind came from smooth underlying surface is less than the WMO recommended value.

&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;ESA&amp;amp;#8217;s Aeolus mission, launched in August 2018, is designed to capture tropospheric wind profiles on a global scale in near-real time. The Aeolus lidar system, Atmospheric LAser Doppler INstrument (ALADIN), uses two modes of lidar-driven active scattering, Mie and Rayleigh scattering channels, to retrieve horizontal line-of-sight (HLOS) winds under both clear and cloudy conditions. ESA Aeolus aims to improve numerical weather and climate prediction, and to advance understanding of atmospheric circulation and weather systems.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;This presentation will describe the Canadian validation activities for ESA Aeolus level-2B product, coordinated by the University of Toronto&amp;amp;#8217;s Department of Physics and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). The main focus is the evaluation of Aeolus overpasses using the fifth major global reanalysis produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF ERA5), and in-situ measurements at Environment and Climate Change Canada&amp;amp;#8217;s (ECCC) Iqaluit and Whitehorse supersites where several wind sensing instruments are co-located. It will compare the Aeolus HLOS winds with the profiles of wind vector from regular radiosonde launches, line-of-sight winds from Doppler Lidar and Ka-Band Radar. The accuracy of the Aeolus measurements is analyzed based on the type of scattering and natural variability of the wind on different levels.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;The radiosonde measures the profiles of temperature, relative humidity, pressure, and winds twice a day with a vertical resolution of 15 m up to 30 km. On the other hand, the Mie scattered 1.5 micron Doppler Lidar retrieves LOS winds at every 3 m as well as aerosol backscatter and depolarization ratio every 5 minutes up to 3 km. Lastly, for every 10 minutes, the dual-polarization Doppler Ka-Band Radar measures the LOS wind speed and direction, cloud and fog backscatter, and depolarization ratio up to a range of 25 km with a vertical resolution of 10 m.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;The wind profiles were directly compared to the profiles derived from other instruments or reanalysis. The vertical structure of the Aeolus winds, for example the wind shear, will also be compared and discussed. The validation results showed that Aeolus is providing some promising initial products and that the ERA5 reanalysis is the most consistent dataset with the Aeolus wind measurements from level-2B product.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;

Convective self-aggregation (CSA) is when tropical deep convection self-organizes in radiative-convective equilibrium (RCE) simulations whereby the moisture field spontaneously separates into strongly convecting and dry, subsiding, subregions. Departing from the classical, constant sea surface temperature, RCE setup, a recent study found that including a diurnal cycle to mimic surface temperature variations between night and day over tropical land, e.g. the Sahel region, enables the onset of CSA. In contrast, corresponding simulations with constant surface temperature, which might emulate the atmosphere over the ocean, showed no strong aggregation (Kruse et al., 2025, Jensen et al., 2022, Haerter et al., 2020). Furthermore, once formed, the “diurnal self-aggregation” remained in place, when surface temperature was then set constant, suggesting a hysteresis effect. We here explore how this diurnal effect is modified by wind shear - a crucial ingredient for realistic Sahelian conditions. We conduct idealized cloud resolving simulations of the tropical atmosphere using the System for Atmospheric Modeling (SAM), version 6.11 (Khairoutdinov and Randall, 2003). The simplified boundary conditions include an irrotational RCE atmosphere with doubly periodic lateral boundaries. We mimic conditions over (i) land by prescribing diurnal sinusoidal surface temperature oscillations and (ii) over the ocean by prescribing a constant sea surface temperature. To mimic wind shear we nudge towards a prescribed wind profile which is based on ERA5 data from tropical northern Africa. In simulation runs (Kruse, 2024), we observe that the level of aggregation and other variables oscillate over time. With our simulations we investigate how these frequencies relate to the chosen domain. Additionally, we explore whether not only the simulations with a diurnal cycle but also simulations with realistic wind shear and a constant sea surface temperature show CSA after multiple weeks. Our analysis has relevance for the understanding of convective clustering over tropical land and the persistence of such clusters when advected over the tropical ocean - thus harboring conclusions for tropical cyclogenesis. Haerter, Jan O., Bettina Meyer, and Silas Boye Nissen. "Diurnal self-aggregation." NPJ Climate and Atmospheric Science 3.1 (2020): 30.Jensen, Gorm G., Romain Fiévet, and Jan O. Haerter. "The diurnal path to persistent convective self‐aggregation." Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems 14.5 (2022): e2021MS002923.Khairoutdinov, Marat F., and David A. Randall. “Cloud Resolving Modeling of the ARM Summer 1997 IOP: Model Formulation, Results, Uncertainties, and Sensitivities.” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 60, no. 4 (2003): 607–25. Kruse, Irene L. “Chasing the Storms. A Simulation and Observation-Based Exploration of Mesoscale Convective Systems and Cold Pools, from the Midlatitudes to the Tropics.” PhD Thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2024.Kruse, Irene L., Romain Fiévet, and Jan O. Haerter. "Tipping to an aggregated state by mesoscale convective systems." Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems 17.3 (2025): e2024MS004369.

The goal of the paper is to reveal discrepancies of turbulent variables over different surfaces (sea, island, land) based on the measurements taken on three towers during (including before and after) seven typhoon episodes from 2008 to 2018. The atmospheric stability, turbulent spectrum, friction velocity, turbulent kinetic energy, dissipative heating, and gust factor are examined. The similar turbulent characteristics over sea and on the island reinforce the previous conclusion that the turbulent measurements on the island mainly represent the sea surface. The turbulent characteristics over sea and on land are very different due to the different underlying surface roughness. The unstable (stable) condition dominates on the sea (land) surface. Turbulent spectra both over sea and on land follow the canonical Kolmogorov’s power law with the −5/3 slope. The cospectra on land are more peaked than those over sea. All of the friction velocity, turbulent kinetic energy, and dissipative heating increase with increasing 10 m wind speed, and those on land are much larger than those over sea. The distributions of gust factors widen and shift to higher on land than those over sea. The distributions of gust factors at heights of 10 m and 40 m are biased to higher values than those at heights of 160 m and 320 m on land.

Six state-of-the-art large-eddy simulation codes were compared in Fedorovich et al. (Preprints, 16th American Meteorological Society Symposium on Boundary Layers and Turbulence, 2004b) for three airflow configurations in order to better understand the effect of wind shear on entrainment dynamics in the convective boundary layer CBL). One such code was the University of Oklahoma large-eddy simulation (LES) code, which at the time employed a second-order leapfrog time-advancement scheme with the Asselin filter. In subsequent years, the code has been updated to use a third-order Runge–Kutta (RK3) time-advancement scheme. This study investigates what effect the upgrade from the leapfrog scheme to RK3 scheme has on turbulence statistics in the CBL differently affected by mean wind shear, also in relation to predictions by other LES codes that participated in the considered comparison exercise. In addition, the effect of changing the Courant number within the RK3 scheme is investigated by invoking the turbulence spectral analysis. Results indicate that low-order flow statistics obtained with the RK3 scheme generally match their counterparts from simulations with the leapfrog scheme rather closely. CBL growth rates due to entrainment in the shear-free case were also similar using both timestepping schemes. It was found, however, that care should be given to the choice of the Courant number value when running LES with the RK3 scheme in the sheared CBL setting. The advantages of the largest possible (based on the stability criterion) Courant number were negated by degrading the energy distribution across the turbulence spectrum. While mean profiles and low-order turbulence statistics were largely unaffected, the entrainment rate was over-predicted compared to that reported in the original code-comparison study.

The growing demand for global wind power production, driven by the critical need for sustainable energy sources, requires reliable estimation of wind speed vertical profiles for accurate wind power prediction and comprehensive wind turbine performance assessment. Traditional methods relying on empirical equations or similarity theory face challenges due to their restricted applicability beyond the surface layer. Although recent studies have utilized various machine learning techniques to vertically extrapolate wind speeds, they often focus on single levels and lack a holistic approach to predicting entire wind profiles. As an alternative, this study introduces a proof-of-concept methodology utilizing TabNet, an attention-based sequential deep learning model, to estimate wind speed vertical profiles from coarse-resolution meteorological features extracted from a reanalysis dataset. To ensure that the methodology is applicable across diverse datasets, Chebyshev polynomial approximation is employed to model the wind profiles. Trained on the meteorological features as inputs and the Chebyshev coefficients as targets, the TabNet more-or-less accurately predicts unseen wind profiles for different wind conditions, such as high shear, low shear/well-mixed, low-level jet, and high wind. Additionally, this methodology quantifies the correlation of wind profiles with prevailing atmospheric conditions through a systematic feature importance assessment.

For realizing the autonomous dynamic soaring maneuver without relying on known wind shear profiles, this paper develops a real-time trajectory correction approach. The strategy is inspired by the fact that large seabirds do not know the wind profile and yet they presumably can feel the wind variations and predict their own motions. Utilizing only the instant wind information rather than the complete profile, this approach formulates a strictly convex quadratic programming problem based on the instant wind strength increment and the predicted errors to determine bounded control inputs. Initialized by an energy-neutral dynamic soaring trajectory that requires the minimum wind strength, control inputs can be corrected in real time. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach under different unspecified wind profiles.