Speaker: Rachel Neville (Northern Arizona University)

Time and Location: AC1 123, 10:40–11:10am

Title: Snowpack Roughness: a Geometric and Topological Approach

Abstract: Roughness of the snowpack surface exhibits a high degree of spatiotemporal variance. Accurate estimation of the surface roughness is a parameter of fundamental importance for estimating turbulent fluxes and is an input into all existing numerical models of surface-atmosphere interactions. However, it proves difficult to estimate numerically from real data. I will discuss challenges and describe geometric and topological techniques to estimate roughness from airborne LIDAR measurements and share some advantages of taking a topological perspective.