Speaker: Colleen Golja

"The Creation of a Coupled Advection-Coagulation Model to Understand the Behavior of Aerosols Injected from the SCoPEx Payload"

Abstract: While many modeling studies have explored the large-scale climate impacts of solar geoengineering, experimental work is needed to decrease uncertainty linked to the chemical and radiative behavior of both engineered and natural aerosols in the stratosphere. The upcoming Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) aims to address these uncertainties by creating and sampling an aerosol plume in the lower stratosphere. This study supports the design of the SCoPEx payload by investigating the efficacy of creating a dispersed plume of mono-disperse aerosols through injection into a turbulent wake. A three-dimensional flux limiting scheme was applied to the steady state velocity and turbulent viscosity fields created by ANSYS Fluent and coupled in time with the coagulation module of the AER-2D sectional aerosol model. This setup was used to investigate the injection location from the payload which would minimize particle growth and sedimentation while achieving a plume diameter large enough to enable detection and resampling. I will discuss the numerical basis of the model and present preliminary results of the study in the context of the SCoPEx design process.

GSPD comprises scientific talks up to one hour in length by graduate students and post docs. All are welcome to attend, including faculty and staff. Lunch will be provided. Please bring reusable plates and cutlery to reduce waste.