David Sankey's Page

Welcome to my homepage at the University of Toronto.

I work as a research associate in the Physics Department of the University of Toronto. As part of the Global Chemistry for Climate (GCC) project headed by Professor Ted Shepherd, I work with the Canadian Middle Atmosphere Model (CMAM) in two particular areas:

• Investigating atmospheric transport in the stratosphere
• The assimilation of atmospheric measurments into the model to improve model forecast prediction

Atmospheric Transport

Mixing barriers play an important role in determining the distribution of chemical species in the atmosphere. Satellite and ground-based observations provide valuable data, but such measurements are limited both in spatial and temporal coverage. The use of models allows us to investigate the interactions between the dynamics and chemistry in the atmosphere by providing a global coverage of data. Observational data provides a mechanism for validating the model datasets. Questions of interest are:

• The formation of the ozone hole
• The global warming effect of greenhouse gases

Data Assimilation

Data assimilation involves the melding of atmospheric observations with a model. The model is initialised from an analysis field which is often not in exact balance leading to the generation of spurious gravity-waves. The initial field is filtered, but the question of the effects of the filtering remains unresolved but is currently being investigated.

Last updated: 19th September 2005