Cold air damming is a phenomenon where certain wind directions can cause cooler air to be trapped against a mountain. In the eastern US, these events are often accompanied by precipitation, and can be especially hazardous in winter with snowfall and freezing rain common. The intensity of these events is difficult to forecast and less scientific attention has been paid to cold air damming events in the mountainous areas of northern New England. This award will allow the research team to develop a climatology and conduct numerical modeling of cold air damming events in order to answer questions about their formation, evolution, and dissipation. The results of the study should help to improve forecasts of high-impact winter precipitation events related to cold air damming. A number of graduate and undergraduate students will be involved in the research, helping to develop the next generation of scientists.
The research team will develop a 15-year climatology and composite study of northern New England cold air damming (CAD) events with a goal of determining when the events occur and when they are most intense, how the events compare at selected locations, and what the role of CAD is on precipitation types. Ensembles of simulations of CAD events using the WRF model will help to answer questions related to the sensitivity of numerical weather prediction forecasts of CAD to initial condition uncertainty and variations in parameterization schemes. The simulations will also help to answer questions about predictability of the formation, strength, extent, evolution, and erosion of CAD.
