Students: Jon Rendulic, Tuan Huynh
Faculty Advisor or Community Project Lead: Jifeng Peng
Summary:
The target of this capstone is to create a web-server for computing and analyzing atmospheric and oceanic flows. Atmospheric and oceanic flows play an important role in the transport of any pollutant in the atmosphere or in the ocean. The flows are usually chaotic with some large-scale dominant patterns and small-scale turbulence. Therefore, it is difficult to accurately forecast pollutant transport. Over the past 15 years (Venkataraman, 2009), scientists have made enormous strides in their ability to identify and make visually represent the underlying mechanics of flowing air and water, and to predict how objects move through these flows.
In 2006, a new analyzing tool was developed in which a dynamic systems approach is used to identify attracting structures in the flow field. This tool, a MATLAB software package was developed in the Biological Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology. It enables users to input a
time-series of 2-D velocity field data and compute the corresponding finite-time Lyapunov exponent (FTLE) fields, from which Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCS) such as vortices and fluid transport
barriers can be identified.
For this project we are to establish a computer server that automatically computes and analyzes real-time oceanic flows using NOAA forecast data. The tasks for the server are to download ocean currents data. NOAA regularly publish ocean currents forecast data and the server would download these data for analysis. We would then compute the attracting structures using an existing algorithm.
Next, set up the algorithm on the server for it to automatically analyze the currents data and determine the attracting structures then visualize the attracting structures. This would be displayed and visualized
on a high resolution map showing the area of interests
Document(s):
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