ARSC computational science seminar - Jan. 27
January 19, 2012
An Arctic Region Supercomputing Center computational science seminar will be held from 11 a.m. – noon, Friday, Jan. 27,
in 103 WRRB (ARSC conference room).
"The INTE and the BOKU-Met research institutes: nuclear engineering, meteorology and
how they meet" will be presented by Delia Arnold of the Institute of Energy Technologies,
Technical University of Catalonia (Barcelona, Spain), and the Institute of Meteorology,
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (Vienna, Austria).
This seminar gives an overview of select activities that require large computational
resources at two very different research institutes. They are the Institute of Energy
Technologies (INTE), performing nuclear engineering research, and the Institute of
Meteorology (BOKU-Met), which is focused on meteorology and its applications. The interests
of these two institutes include common goals, requiring interdisciplinary expertise.
INTE performs research and technology transfer activities on subjects related to the
use of ionising radiation and associated risks, energy and accelerators. Within these
research areas, two are the most demanding from the computational perspective: medical
radiophysics and the environmental. Both areas require the use of Monte-Carlo simulations,
and, in the case of the environmental, calculations are also needed for meteorological and
atmospheric transport.
BOKU-Met carries out research in four main fields: agrometeorology, atmospheric radiation,
climate and environmental meteorology. Climate and environmental meteorology often
require running numerical weather and chemistry models for long periods of time. The
complex topographical structure of Austria requires highly resolved numerical simulations
to capture regional and local meteorological, air quality and climatological features. Numerical
models such as WRF and MM5 are therefore pushed to their limits and beyond.
The latest events of Fukushima have demonstrated once again that an interdisciplinary
approach is needed in many fields. This seminar will show how some of the applications
carried out at BOKU-Met and INTE meet to fulfill common aims in nuclear surveillance,
atmospheric transport modelling and model assessment.
The presenter, Delia Arnold, currently holds a research assistant position at the Institute
of Energy Technologies at the University of Catalonia (Barcelona, Spain) in the environmental
radioactivity research program. The main tasks of the program include atmospheric
transport of radioactive releases and natural radioactive tracer transport studies.
She combined this position for the last three years (2009-2011) with a post-doc at
the Institute of Meteorology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
(Vienna, Austria) to gather expertise in numerical weather modelling and its application
both to climate change and environmental meteorology in places with complex topography. Arnold
holds a degree in physics (2002) from the University of Barcelona (Spain) and a PhD
in nuclear engineering (2009) from the Technical University of Catalonia.
For more information contact ARSC at 450-8600 or info@arsc.edu.