神戸大学　理学研究科　惑星学専攻・惑星学科　Home　Page

Applied Planetology

• Members:
  Visiting Prof. Takuya Kawabata(URL), Visiting Associate Prof. Satoru Yoshida(URL)

Research Interests:

Japan has experienced natural disaster conditions brought by torrential rain, typhoons, ans so on. The global warming is also an urgent issue. Thus, meteorology is an increasingly important branch of the planetary science. We are to study the following issues of the meteorology, by making use of various facilities of the Meteorological Research Institute of the Japan Meteorological Agency.

1. Data assimilation and predictions of local heavy rainfalls
Topics on data assimilation and weather prediction systems will be given in this lecture course. It is quite difficult to predict local heavy rainfall events, which have been called as 'Guerrilla heavy rainfalls" theses days, due to their small horizontal scale and large temporal variation. For the successful prediction, we need data assimilation techniques, which provides a bridge between "observations" and "simulations". This lecture coarse briefly presents 1) observations on meso-convective systems, 2) simualtion models, 3) data assimilation theory, and 4) mechanisms of local heavy rainfall events.

2. Remote sensing
Remote sensing using electromagnetic waves (light or radio waves) is a technique that uses electromagnetic waves to obtain physical quantities at a distant. For example, a weather radar is one type of remote sensing techniques. By transmitting radio wavs and receiving radio waves scattered from raindrops, it is possible to know the area of rainfall and the amount of rainfall at a distant. In most of geophysical and planetary science, research targets are often very far away and/or very large, so remote sensing is one of essential techniques in these fields. In addition, observation data obtained with remote sensing tecniques are also useful for mumerical simulations since observation data can be used for data assimilation. This course provides basic understanding of electromagnetic waves, and introduces the latest remote sensing techniques such as weather radars, lightning sensors, and atmospheric lidars.

Current Projects:

• Data assimilation technique
• Prediction of local heavy rainfalls
• Development of remote sensing systems

UPDATE　7/6/2022