A senior at Penn State majoring in meteorology, Nick Geyer spent his summer at
CMMAP visualizing and animating data created by the Vector Vorticity Cloud Model
(VVCM) used to simulate the winter 2006 sixteen day Tropical Warm Pool -
International Cloud Experiment (TWP-ICE) data collected by the Atmospheric
Radiation Measurement Program (ARM) and Australian Bureau of Meteorology in
Darwin, Austrailia. Nick's summer advisor was Professor David Randall and he
received guidance from researchers Celal Konor and Tom Cram.
The VVCM is a non-hydrostaic, anelastic cloud resolving model based on the
vector vorticity equation which allows the model to directly derive velocities
from vorticity and simplify the problem of boundary conditions at the surface of
complex terrains. Nick used Fortran 90 programs and IDL to analyze and visualize the output data.
The three dimensional visualization of cloud data represented cloud water mass
mixing ratio from .4 to 1.4 g/kg and accurately described the relative sizes,
advective properties, and growth of convective clouds over the experiment's
domain. To reaffirm their three dimensional output, X-Y graphs of cloud water
mass mixing ratios, vertical velocities, and cloud top temperatures represented
moist thermal plumes and cloud tops. From these graphs and analyses, Nick found
that the VVCM is behaving correctly as a cloud resolving model in the case of
the TWP-ICE experiment. As a followup, Nick suggested further work should
continue to enhance the VVCM's structure and output by testing the ARM 1997
land experiment over Oklahoma.
Nick's research interests include atmospheric dynamics, climate dynamics, air
quality, and dispersion. Outside of research and school, he has a lot of
hobbies including camping, hiking, soccer, football, swimming, cooking, drawing,
music, the Boy Scouts of America, Theta Chi Fraternity, and Chi Epsilon Pi.
Nick's research poster may be found here,
Simulation of the TWP-ICE Case with the Vector Vorticity Cloud Model, 2MB PDF.
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