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Graduate student gives seminar at NASA |
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 Emil Constantinescu, Ph.D. student at the Computer Science department at Virginia Tech, gave an invited seminar at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Office of Global Modeling and Assimilation, on December 18, 2007. The seminar was entitled “Ensemble Kalman filter data assimilation for atmospheric chemistry and transport models.”
As Constantinescu explained, data assimilation is a process through which observations or measurements are incorporated into a computational simulation with the purpose of adjusting the results to better represent the reality. The typical example is found in weather forecasting; here long term predictions are unreliable due to the chaotic nature of the atmosphere. Real observations are needed to adjust the simulation variables in order to have a better representation of the atmosphere and thus improve the forecast skill.
“My advisor, Dr. Adrian Sandu, and I have developed a data assimilation algorithm for the assimilation of observations in atmospheric chemistry simulations. These applications are central in air pollution models and are becoming a very important component in climate models. Our data assimilation techniques proved to be very effective in an operational-like real test case,” said Constantinescu.
“My visit to NASA was great a experience in many aspects. I had the opportunity to present a very important component of my research and interact with top scientists at NASA. I was also able to get a glimpse at the state-of-the-art projects that they are working on. Our hope is that the data assimilation techniques developed by our group at the Computational Science Laboratory may become a component used in operational models for climate simulations,” Constantinescu concluded.
Emil Constantinescu will graduate from Virginia Tech in May 2008. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Automatic Control and Computers from Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania in 2001 and 2002, respectively. Constantinescu’s research interests include numerical methods for multiscale/multiphysics simulations, as well as uncertainty quantification and reduction for large-scale models. He has 7 journal publications, and has participated in over 10 conference events.
For more information about Constantinescu’s research, please see http://people.cs.vt.edu/~emconsta
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