Experiments and Field Campaigns

Alongside numerical modelling, I have joined field campaigns and laboratory experiments: prescribed grassland fires on the Kansas prairie, a cold-pool observation network in Germany, meteorology and air-quality measurements in Seoul, and a laboratory experiment.

Figure. Watching a prescribed grassland burn at Konza Prairie, Kansas.

Prescribed grassland fires at Konza Prairie, Kansas

I joined a series of prescribed-fire experiments at the Konza Prairie Biological Station near Manhattan, Kansas. Small and large burns on several tallgrass plots were used to observe how fire spreads and what the smoke plume is made of, with drones sampling the plume from above.

Figure. Konza Prairie before a burn (left) and during a prescribed fire (right).

FESSTVaL: a cold-pool station network (2021)

FESSTVaL (Field Experiment on Submesoscale Spatio-Temporal Variability in Lindenberg), held east of Berlin in summer 2021, combined a dense network of about a hundred surface stations with X-band radar, Doppler lidars, microwave radiometers, radiosondes and drone flights to catch convective cold pools as they passed. I was responsible for processing and analysing the soil observations, and also worked on model simulations of the cold-pool events.

Figure. An APOLLO station and the FESSTVaL station network (top), and the FESSTVaL team (bottom).

Urban park campaign around Seolleung (2015)

I took part in a multi-instrument campaign in and around the Seolleung royal tomb park in Gangnam, Seoul, to see how an urban park affects the weather and air quality around it. Mobile measurements with an instrumented van were combined with meteorological and air-quality stations inside the park.

Figure. Mobile measurement van (left) and meteorology and air-quality instruments inside the park (right).

Rooftop and on-road air quality in a street canyon (2014)

In a busy street canyon along Dongjak-daero, Seoul, we measured traffic-related pollutants (NOx, CO and O3) on a rooftop and at the roadside at the same time, and showed how the ambient wind controls the relationship between the two (Kwak et al. 2016, Environmental Pollution).

Figure. Measurement sites in the Dongjak-daero street canyon (Kwak et al. 2016).

Turbulence and ozone in a high-rise building area (2013)

In June 2013 we set up turbulence and ozone instruments at a rooftop site and a sidewalk site in a high-rise district of Seoul, to compare the flow and ozone above and inside the urban canopy (Park et al. 2015, SOLA).

Figure. Rooftop and sidewalk measurement sites (Park et al. 2015, SOLA).

Stratified Taylor–Couette flow in the laboratory

In the laboratory we ran Taylor–Couette experiments with salt-stratified water between two rotating cylinders; I took part both in running the experiments and in analysing them. The flow visualizations show how the centrifugal and strato-rotational instabilities compete as rotation and stratification change (Park et al. 2018, Journal of Fluid Mechanics).

Figure. Flow visualizations of the stratified Taylor–Couette experiment (Park et al. 2018).