Lagrangian coherent structures as mesoscale transport barriers in atmospheric flows

Coherent structures in two-dimensional flows have long been studied in the context of transport in fluid dynamics. However, for geophysical systems a small vertical velocity can lead to nontrivial three-dimensional motion of airborne biological populations affecting agriculture or hazardous outputs from natural disasters. The pathways and barriers in the lower atmosphere, from ground level to a kilometer altitude and over a horizontal scale of several kilometers-which bridge the scale of, for example, local farmlands to the larger regional scale-are still unclear. This requires exploring relevant spatiotemporal scales related to advection in the space of 3D + time. In this talk, we will present the application of finite-time Lyapunov exponent based three-dimensional Lagrangian coherent structures (LCS) to address questions of transport using historical data sets from satellite observations, field measurements and the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model.