Kevin Adkins
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Daytona Beach, FL·Earth & Environmental Science
Along sunny coastlines, land heats faster than the ocean. That difference drives a sea breeze, a flow of cooler ocean air pushing inland, and the boundary where sea air meets land air can trigger thunderstorms.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
- Topics
sea breeze
thunderstorm initiation
boundary-layer meteorology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Measure the surface energy budget and key weather variables continuously with a 30-meter flux tower in coastal Florida, to identify when sea-breeze boundaries and circulations pass the site.
- Compare measurements from the stationary flux tower with those from uncrewed aircraft systems (drones) flown during ISARRA Flight Week, to assess how well mobile and fixed platforms agree.
- Train students in field instrumentation, data quality control and interpretation of surface–atmosphere interactions by having them analyze tower data to forecast boundary-layer conditions and plan drone flights.
More about the research
Measuring these shifting boundaries near the ground is hard. Small drones, or uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS), offer a flexible new way to sample this lowest layer of the atmosphere, called the boundary layer.
Why it matters
Sea breezes help set off thunderstorms along coasts such as Florida's. Better observations of how these boundaries form and move could improve understanding of coastal storm initiation. The project also builds practical methods for checking drone-based weather measurements against a fixed reference tower. Atmospheric scientists increasingly rely on such cross-checks as uncrewed aircraft become common observing tools.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
John Cassano
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Earth & Environmental Science
Collect year-round, autonomous atmospheric and surface measurements from an instrumented 30-meter tall tower at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide field camp, to track how the lowest layer of air exchanges heat with the ice.
Patricia Cleary
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, WI·Earth & Environmental Science
Develop and integrate an uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) vertical profiler, including a nitrogen dioxide (NO2) instrument built with NOAA, to measure ozone and NO2 above the Lake Michigan shoreline.
Zhanqing Li
University of Maryland, MD·Earth & Environmental Science
Determine how cloud-surface coupling, the link between clouds and the lowest atmospheric layer, changes the influence of aerosols on clouds over urban, forested and coastal land surfaces.
The school
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Daytona Beach: 5 labs on PI Pages, $35M a year on research, 27 research doctorates a year.
More about Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Daytona Beach
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