Papers by Yelena Pichugina
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, Dec 1, 2017
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Jan 14, 2015
Recent increases in oil and natural gas (NG) production throughout the western US have come with ... more Recent increases in oil and natural gas (NG) production throughout the western US have come with scientific and public interest in emission rates, air quality and climate impacts related to this industry. This study uses a regionalscale air quality model (WRF-Chem) to simulate high ozone (O 3) episodes during the winter of 2013 over the Uinta Basin (UB) in northeastern Utah, which is densely populated by thousands of oil and NG wells. The high-resolution meteorological simulations are able qualitatively to reproduce the wintertime cold pool conditions that occurred in 2013, allowing the model to reproduce the observed multi-day buildup of atmospheric pollutants and the accompanying rapid photochemical ozone formation in the UB. Two different emission scenarios for the oil and NG sector were employed in this study. The first emission scenario (bottom-up) was based on the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) National Emission Inventory (NEI) (2011, version 1) for the oil and NG sector for the UB. The second emission scenario (top-down) was based on estimates of methane (CH 4) emissions derived from in situ aircraft measurements and a regression analysis for multiple species relative to CH 4 concentration measurements in the UB. Evaluation of the model results shows greater underestimates of CH 4 and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the simulation with the NEI-2011 inventory than in the case when the top-down emission scenario was used. Unlike VOCs, the NEI-2011 inventory significantly overesti-1 Introduction The development of new drilling and stimulation technologies has resulted in a large increase in the number of active unconventional oil and NG wells and accelerated oil and NG production onshore in the US during the last decade (www. eia.gov). The quantification of the potential impacts of oil and NG production emissions on climate and air quality is a topic that has received recent attention (Schnell et al., 2009;
... Blumen, W., RM Banta, SP Burns, DC Fritts, RK Newsom, GS Poulos, and J. Sun, 2001: Turbulence... more ... Blumen, W., RM Banta, SP Burns, DC Fritts, RK Newsom, GS Poulos, and J. Sun, 2001: Turbulence statistics of a Kelvin-Helmholtz billow event observed in the nighttime boundary layer during the CASES-99 field program. Dyn. ... Lett., 25, 12281230. Zamora, RJ, and Coauthors. ...
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, Dec 1, 2017
Department of Energy (DOE) reports produced after 1991 and a growing number of pre-1991 documents... more Department of Energy (DOE) reports produced after 1991 and a growing number of pre-1991 documents are available free via www.OSTI.gov.
Wind Energy, 2016
The atmospheric flow phenomenon known as the Low Level Jet (LLJ) is an important source of wind p... more The atmospheric flow phenomenon known as the Low Level Jet (LLJ) is an important source of wind power production in the Great Plains. However, due to the lack of measurements with the precision and vertical resolution needed, particularly at rotor heights, it is not well‐characterized or understood in offshore regions being considered for wind‐farm development.The present paper describes the properties of LLJs and wind shear through the rotor layer of a hypothetical wind turbine, as measured from a ship‐borne Doppler lidar in the Gulf of Maine in July–August 2004.LLJs, frequently observed below 600 m, were mostly during nighttime and transitional periods, but they were also were seen during some daytime hours. The presence of a LLJ significantly modified wind profiles producing vertical wind speed shear. When the wind shear was strong, the estimates of wind power based upon wind speeds measured at hub‐height could have significant errors. Additionally, the inference of hub‐height wi...
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, Dec 1, 2017
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, Dec 1, 2014
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, Dec 18, 2015
Recent increases in oil and natural gas (NG) production throughout the western US have come with ... more Recent increases in oil and natural gas (NG) production throughout the western US have come with scientific and public interest in emission rates, air quality and climate impacts related to this industry. This study uses a regional scale air quality model WRF-Chem to simulate high ozone (O 3) episodes during the winter of 2013 over the Uinta Basin (UB) in northeastern Utah, which is densely populated by thousands of oil and NG wells. The high resolution meteorological simulations are able to qualitatively reproduce the wintertime cold pool conditions that occurred in 2013, allowing the model to reproduce the observed multi-day buildup of atmospheric pollutants and accompanying rapid photochemical ozone formation in the UB. Two different emission scenarios for the oil and NG sector were employed in this study. The first emission scenario (bottom-up) was based on the US EPA National Emission Inventory (NEI) (2011, version 1) for the oil and NG sector for the UB. The second emission scenario (top-down) was based on the previously derived estimates of methane (CH 4) emissions and a regression analysis for multiple species relative to CH 4 concentration measurements in the UB. WRF-Chem simulations using the two emission data sets resulted in significant differences for concentrations of most gas-phase species. Evaluation of the model results shows greater underestimates of CH 4 and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the simulation with the NEI-2011 inventory than the case when the top-down emission scenario was used. Unlike VOCs, the NEI-2011 inventory significantly overestimates the emissions of nitrogen oxides (NO x), while the top-down emission scenario results in a moderate negative bias. Comparison of simulations using the two emission data sets reveals that the top-down case captures the high O 3 episodes. In contrast, the simulation case using the bottom-up inventory is not able to reproduce any of the observed high O 3 concentrations in the UB.
Epj Web of Conferences, 2016
Coherent Doppler LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) has been widely used to provide measurements... more Coherent Doppler LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) has been widely used to provide measurements of several boundary layer parameters such as profiles of wind speed, wind direction, vertical velocity statistics, mixing layer heights and turbulent kinetic energy (TKE). An important aspect of providing this wide range of meteorological data is to properly characterize the uncertainty associated with these measurements. With the above intent in mind, the Lidar Uncertainty Measurement Experiment (LUMEX) was conducted at Erie, Colorado during the period June 23 rd to July 13 th , 2014. The major goals of this experiment were the following:
Weather and Forecasting, 2021
Complex-terrain locations often have repeatable near-surface wind patterns, such as synoptic gap ... more Complex-terrain locations often have repeatable near-surface wind patterns, such as synoptic gap flows and local thermally forced flows. An example is the Columbia River Valley in east-central Oregon-Washington, a significant wind-energy-generation region and the site of the Second Wind-Forecast Improvement Project (WFIP2). Data from three Doppler lidars deployed during WFIP2 define and characterize summertime wind regimes and their large-scale contexts, and provide insight into NWP model errors by examining differences in the ability of a model [NOAA’s High-Resolution Rapid-Refresh (HRRR-version1)] to forecast wind-speed profiles for different regimes. Seven regimes were identified based on daily time series of the lidar-measured rotor-layer winds, which then suggested two broad categories. First, in three regimes the primary dynamic forcing was the large-scale pressure gradient. Second, in two regimes the dominant forcing was the diurnal heating-cooling cycle (regional sea-breeze-...
Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology
Low-level jets (LLJs) are an important nocturnal source of wind energy in the U.S. Great Plains. ... more Low-level jets (LLJs) are an important nocturnal source of wind energy in the U.S. Great Plains. An August 2017 lidar-based field-measurement campaign (LAFE) studied LLJs over the Central SGP site in Oklahoma, and found nearly equal occurrences of the usual southerly jets, and postfrontal northeasterly jets—typically rare during this season—for an opportunity to compare the two types of LLJs during this month. Southerly winds were stronger than the north-easterlies by more than 4 ms−1 on average, reflecting a significantly higher frequency of winds stronger than 12 ms−1. The analysis of this dataset has been expanded to other SGP Doppler-lidar sites to quantify the variability of winds and LLJ properties between sites of different land use. Geographic variations of winds over the study area were noted: on southerly-wind nights, the winds blew stronger at the highest, westernmost sites by 2 ms−1, whereas on the northeasterlyflow nights, the easternmost sites had the strongest wind sp...
ams.confex.com
A major objective of CASES-99 was to relate surface fluxes to features of the evolving stable bou... more A major objective of CASES-99 was to relate surface fluxes to features of the evolving stable boundary layer, such as the low-level jet (LLJ). In a recently completed study we used a combination of high-resolution Doppler lidar (HRDL: see Grund et al., 1999), a 60-m instrumented ...
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, Dec 1, 2019
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Papers by Yelena Pichugina