Melitta Fiebig-Wittmaack

Mesoscale Wind Regimes in Chile at 30°S

Abstract In November of 1999, four permanent surface stations were installed in the vicinity of the surface ozone monitoring station on the summit of the Cerro Tololo (2200 m MSL) in Chile at 30°S. These stations were used to study the atmospheric flow conditions, which are important for the interpretation of the ozone measurements at Cerro Tololo. In addition, radiosonde ascents were performed in March of 2000 near the coast and about 60 km inland. Different wind regimes were distinguished. Above 4 km MSL, large-scale westerly winds prevailed, while northerly winds were observed in a band along the coastline between 2- and 4-km-MSL height. The upper boundary of the northerly wind regime corresponded to the mean height of the Andes mountain range. This wind regime resulted from the westerly winds being blocked and forced to flow in parallel to the Andes (when Froude number is less than 1). The phenomenon was also confirmed by model simulations. Seasonally varying, thermally induced valley winds and a sea ...

Climatic trends and impact of climate change on agriculture in an arid Andean valley

Little is known about climate change and its impacts for the arid coastal and mountainous regions in northern Chile. The Elqui river basin, part of the Norte Chico of Chile between 27ºS and 33ºS latitude, is located south of the hyper-arid Atacama desert. Despite water scarcity, agricultural development in this region has been enhanced by agronomic practices and the marketing of valuable products. This paper characterizes the actual climate conditions and presents an overview and analyses of past climate variability, and future possible climate trends, emphasizing those relevant to agriculture. Precipitation shows an important decrease during the first decades of the past century. Runoff shows decreasing trends for the first half of the past century and increases for 1960 to 1985. Drought appears to be increasing. Statistical downscaling was accomplished using the Long Ashton Research Station Weather Generator. Both future periods of 2011 to 2030 and 2046–65 showed trends to higher minimum and maximum temperature. The number of hot days (maximum temperature greater than or equal to 30°C) has a strong increasing trend during October to April. Even though the downscaled results for precipitation do not show trends, the continuation of the present trend of low amounts is a concern. We discuss some implications of climatic changes for agriculture and we emphasize the importance of adaptation, especially to deal with water scarcity.

Tridiagonal preconditioning for Poisson-like difference equations with flat grids: Application to incompressible atmospheric flow

The convergence of many iterative procedures, in particular that of the conjugate gradient method, strongly depends on the condition number of the linear system to be solved. In cases with a large condition number, therefore, preconditioning is often used to transform the system into an equivalent one, with a smaller condition number and therefore faster convergence. For Poisson-like difference equations with flat grids, the vertical part of the difference operator is dominant and tridiagonal and can be used for preconditioning. Such a procedure has been applied to incompressible atmospheric flows to preserve incompressibility, where a system of Poisson-like difference equations is to be solved for the dynamic pressure part. In the mesoscale atmospheric model KAMM, convergence has been speeded up considerably by tridiagonal preconditioning, even though the system matrix is not symmetric and, hence, the biconjugate gradient method must be used.

Existence of multiple ordered solutions for a semilinear elliptic boundary value problem

We consider the problem of existence of multiple ordered solutions for the semi-linear elliptic boundary value problem where L is a second order uniformly elliptic operator. We show that for the case where f exhibits a certain type of oscillatory behavior and g is related to f by a boundedness condition, there exist multiple ordered solutions of the Neumann problem, related to the falling zeroes of the function f. Imposing a monotonicity condition on f we obtain inclusion results for the solutions of the problem, both in the autonomous case with general boundary conditions and in the nonautonomous Neumann case. The proof of our result is based on the maximum principle and on some theorems of Matano [7, 8]

An averaging method applied to a duffing equation

We approximate a Duffing equation by an averaged system. We solve the system explicitely and draw bifurcation diagrams in dependence of the forcing term. We discuss the goodness of the averaging method, relative to the behavior of the solutions in dependence of involved parameters, by comparing with results obtained in [6,10] for the original Duffing equation.