ARSC computational science seminar - Jan. 27

January 19, 2012

Marmian Grimes

An Arctic Region Supercomputing Center computational science seminar will be held from 11 a.m. – noon, Friday, Jan. 27, in 103 WRRB (ARSC conference room).

"The INTE and the BOKU-Met research institutes: nuclear engineering, meteorology and how they meet" will be presented by Delia Arnold of the Institute of Energy Technologies, Technical University of Catalonia (Barcelona, Spain), and the Institute of Meteorology, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (Vienna, Austria).

This seminar gives an overview of select activities that require large computational resources at two very different research institutes. They are the Institute of Energy Technologies (INTE), performing nuclear engineering research, and the Institute of Meteorology (BOKU-Met), which is focused on meteorology and its applications. The interests of these two institutes include common goals, requiring interdisciplinary expertise.

INTE performs research and technology transfer activities on subjects related to the use of ionising radiation and associated risks, energy and accelerators. Within these research areas, two are the most demanding from the computational perspective: medical radiophysics and the environmental. Both areas require the use of Monte-Carlo simulations, and, in the case of the environmental, calculations are also needed for meteorological and atmospheric transport.

BOKU-Met carries out research in four main fields: agrometeorology, atmospheric radiation, climate and environmental meteorology. Climate and environmental meteorology often require running numerical weather and chemistry models for long periods of time. The complex topographical structure of Austria requires highly resolved numerical simulations to capture regional and local meteorological, air quality and climatological features. Numerical models such as WRF and MM5 are therefore pushed to their limits and beyond.

The latest events of Fukushima have demonstrated once again that an interdisciplinary approach is needed in many fields. This seminar will show how some of the applications carried out at BOKU-Met and INTE meet to fulfill common aims in nuclear surveillance, atmospheric transport modelling and model assessment.

The presenter, Delia Arnold, currently holds a research assistant position at the Institute of Energy Technologies at the University of Catalonia (Barcelona, Spain) in the environmental radioactivity research program. The main tasks of the program include atmospheric transport of radioactive releases and natural radioactive tracer transport studies. She combined this position for the last three years (2009-2011) with a post-doc at the Institute of Meteorology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (Vienna, Austria) to gather expertise in numerical weather modelling and its application both to climate change and environmental meteorology in places with complex topography. Arnold holds a degree in physics (2002) from the University of Barcelona (Spain) and a PhD in nuclear engineering (2009) from the Technical University of Catalonia.

For more information contact ARSC at 450-8600 or info@arsc.edu.