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Duke Personnel
Roni Avissar, Ph.D.
Professor - Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Contact info: avissar@duke.edu, 919-660-5458
Professor Avissar is the lead PI for the HOP. While he is mostly known for his work on turbulence, mesoscale atmospheric processes and regional and global climate studies, he has also investigated various complex atmospheric flow problems using a combination of wind tunnels, observations and numerical models. Particularly relevant for this project, he is a helicopter pilot (Certified Flight Instructor rated and current for instrument flights) and he studied in details the aerodynamics of helicopters under various maneuvers in flights and with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. His experience as a scientist and a professional pilot gives him the unique advantage of understanding the measurement needs together with the limits of maneuverability of the helicopter, which are two key elements of such an operation. He serves as the pilot in command for the platform in all field campaigns.
Heidi Holder
Doctoral student - Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Contact info: heh5@duke.edu, 919-660-5493
Heidi was recruited as a graduate student to work on this project in 2003. She is expected to complete her Ph.D. by the summer of 2008. She was involved in various aspects of the HOP developments, including data acquisition system, sensor calibrations, and field campaigns. She developed the data processing protocol and the data detrending and denoising method. She is investigating the effects of land-cover heterogeneity on the development of the atmospheric boundary layer using the data collected during CLASIC on-board the HOP and with a mobile LIDAR mounted on a truck.
Adam Bolch
Doctoral student - Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Contact info: adam.bolch@duke.edu, 919-660-5493
Adam started his Ph.D. in 2005 and was involved in the different field campaigns that took place in the past couple of years with the HOP. He is processing the data collected in the field campaigns and he will use them to evaluate the performance of the Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Model (OLAM) in simulating the land-atmosphere interactions that existed during the campaigns.
Patrick Canning
Undergraduate student - Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Contact info: patrick.canning@duke.edu
In an independent study that is part of his undergraduate degree requirements in Civil Engineering, Patrick simulated the Bell 206B3 Jet Ranger in flight at different airspeeds using FLUENT, a state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software.
Nathan Abehserra
Visiting student - Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Nathan is conducting an internship in our group at Duke University as part of the requirements for his engineering degree in fluid dynamics at the "École Nationale Supérieure d'Ingénieurs en Informatique, Automatique, Mécanique, Énergétique et Électronique (ENSIANE)" in Valenciennes, France. The objective of his project is to design an inlet for the Atmospheric Chemistry Package (ACP) currently under development in collaboration with NCAR, and to simulate its performance in flight with FLUENT.
Collaborators
William Eichinger, Ph.D.
Professor, University of Iowa
Professor Eichinger is an expert in LIDAR development and science. He built the LIDAR that is being attached in a pod under the belly of the HOP. He participated with his mobile LIDAR in the CLASIC field campaign that took place in Oklahoma in June 2007.
Naoki Matayoshi
Contact info: matayoshi.naoki@jaxa.jp, (+81) 442-40-3368
Naoki is the PI in charge of the Kaijo/JAXA Ultrasonic Velocimeter prototype that is mounted on the HOP nose. He is involved in the calibration and data analysis produced by this sensor.
Katya Prince
Prince Consulting, LLC
Contact info: katyaprince@earthlink.net, 919-419-0845
Katya designed and developed the data acquisition system and real-time visualization system that is currently on the HOP.
Boxell Helicopters
Lance Syner, President
Contact info: lsyner@boxellhelicopters.com, 843-761-6675
Boxell Helicopters, located in Moncks Corner, SC, is responsible for manufacturing and installing the electrical and structural components of the research sensors that are mounted on the HOP