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Stephen Garner

Lecturer with rank of: Associate Professor

Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Tropospheric Dynamics at the "Mesoscale" where Planetary Rotation Has Only a Weak Control Over the Flow
      Mesoscale phenomena in the troposphere are primarily due to surface forcing and moisture. I have worked on extreme cases of both topographic forcing and moist convection, namely, blocking events in the first instance and self-organizing squall lines in the second. In both phenomena, the modeling effort is complicated by a permanent alteration of far-field conditions by the disturbance.
      I have investigated numerical forecasting methods that assimilate mesoscale data distributed in time as well as space. Four-dimensional assimilation "technologies" have been successful for large-scale prediction, but there are unique problems if the data are mesoscale. The additional degrees of freedom due to moisture, gravity-inertia waves, and other nongeostrophic phenomena add complexity and ambiguity to the problem of minimizing forecast error.
Some Recent Publications:
Garner, S.T., 1999: Blocking and frontogenesis by two-dimensional terrain in baroclinic flow. Part I: Numerical experiments. Journal of Atmospheric Science, 56, 1495-1508.

Garner, S.T., 1999: Blocking and frontogenesis by two-dimensional terrain in baroclinic flow. Part II: Analysis of stagnation mechanisms. Journal of Atmospheric Science, 56, 1509-1523.

Govindasamy, B., and S.T. Garner, 1997: The equilibration of short baroclinic waves. Journal of Atmospheric Science, 54, 2850-2871.