Research Expertise and Interest

environmental fluid mechanics, wind energy applications, clouds, large-eddy simulation, turbulence modeling, atmospheric boundary layer flow, flow over complex terrain, wildfire smoke transport, methane emissions, urban dispersion modeling, urban air quality

Research Description

Fotini Chow is the Fred and Claire Sauer Chair in Environmental Engineering and a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The research in her group focuses on numerical modeling of the atmospheric boundary layer, which they use to improve predictions for wind energy, air pollution dispersion, and cloud dynamics, among other applications. The analytical and computational methods that they develop help to quantify climate change mitigation strategies, air quality effects, and cloud representation and feedbacks in regional climate models.

Current projects include studies of wind turbine interactions with boundary layer dynamics over steep terrain, wildfire smoke modeling, methane emissions modeling, urban dispersion modeling, and improved numerical techniques for turbulence, representation of topography, and grid nesting, among others.