Jacksonville Simulations

This page describes a numerical simulation of gravity waves generated by an idealized thunderstorm over Jacksonville, Florida. The thunderstorm parameters are the same as those used by Heale et al. (2020) for their study of wave filtering and ultimate breaking for various climatological conditions. In particular, the thunderstom has a radially-symmetric Gaussian distribution in the horizontal plane with standard deviation 8 km and cosine distribution in the vertical with wavelength 11.25 km. It also has a cosine variation in time (one cycle) with period 20 minutes.

Computational Domain

The mesh is clustered in both horizontal directions in order to achieve 500 x 500 meter spacing over the center 60 x 60 km region. Very weak stretching is used so that the resolution is still ~500 x 500 m over the entire grid. The domain extends to an altitude of 64 km and uses uniform vertical spacing of 250 m. A total of 340 x 340 x 256 mesh points are used. Sponge layers are used on all external boundaries in order to absorb outgoing waves.

Wind and Thermodynamic Profiles

The mean winds and temperature profile are taken from radiosonde data, on three dates in May and June 2018, from a launch site in Jacksonville, Florida. These profiles extend to an altitude slightly more than 30 km. The profiles were then blended smoothly with climatology data extending to the top of the domain. Plots of various profiles for the three separate balloon measurements are shown below. Note that each profile is resampled on the 250m mesh spacing.