By J. Brock (FINN)
In early January 2013 Ralph Burton, Barbara Brooks, Alan Gadian and James Groves are heading to the island of South Georgia via the Falklands. They are going there to make measurement of the meteorological conditions including gravity waves and turbulence. This will be the first full deployment of the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) that has been instrumented by Dr Barbara Brooks for this project.
A presentation on the project was given at Government House on Wednesday evening.
At the presentation they explained that South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean is the largest of the South Sandwich Islands. The island is mountainous and this has important consequences for the meteorology. Turbulence and gravity waves tend to occur when then prevailing westerly wind is perpendicular to the mountain ranges, and these phenomena can be hazardous to both shipping and aircraft.
The South Georgia project aims to aid prediction of turbulent and gravity wave events in the South Georgia local area. The project will be implementing two strands of research, collection of data and the use of a forecast model. The overall aim of the project is to demonstrate that a state-of-the-art forecast model can be implemented and run locally on an inexpensive computer platform in South Georgia, and to provide operationally accurate forecasts of hazardous conditions.
More can be found at: http://www.ncas.ac.uk
