Atmosphere & Weapons Phenomenology (AWP)

The Atmospheric Modeling and Weapon Phenomenology Team (AMW) creates, implements, and refines numerical simulation tools for a wide range of atmospheric phenomena.  The team’s expertise ranges from numerical algorithm schemes to microscale, mesoscale, and global-scale atmospheric phenomena to nuclear explosion-induced atmospheric physics.  In addition, this team possesses expertise in subsurface modeling and is working towards coupling atmospheric, subsurface, and ecosystem processes models for climate impacts research.

Research activities include those concerning natural phenomena such as cloud microphysics, wind interaction with heterogeneous plant canopies, airborne seed transport of invasive species, coupled wildfire/atmosphere behavior, hurricane intensification, lightning phenomena, and regional climate impacts at high latitudes.  Several of the team’s research directions include coupled natural and anthropogenic systems including wind flows in urban settings and wind interaction with single or multiple spinning wind turbines.  The team is creating a new suite of simulation tools for development and propagation of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) in urban and ambient environment conditions as well as optical signatures from nuclear explosions.

This team makes cross-cutting use of LANL’s high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities, and is actively pursuing novel application of fully-implicit solution, combined Lagrangian/Eulerian simulation, data assimilation, and parameter estimation techniques.  The team is porting codes to LANL’s new hybrid architectures in hopes of achieving an order of magnitude speed up in the simulation of the phenomena described above.