Supervisor: Andreas Stohl (Department of Meteorology and Geophysics)

Funding Situation: supervisor has secured funding

Project outline: Lagrangian atmospheric transport models are usually driven off-line with meteorological data taken from a meteorological model. An example is FLEXPART, which has been developed at the University of Vienna. However, the off-line nature of these models means that they usually cannot take advantage of the full spatial and, especially, temporal resolution of the driving meteorological model, thus degrading the quality of their output. This project shall develop an on-line Lagrangian transport model, implemented into a high-resolution global meteorological model (e.g. ECMWF-IFS or ICON) and demonstrate its superior quality of the description of atmospheric transport over both Lagrangian off-line modelling as well as Eulerian on-line modelling by making quantitative comparisons. The study shall also apply the new model in one or two of the following research fields: water vapour transport (e.g. during extreme events), transport of forest fire aerosols (e.g., in a pyro-convective event), or development of statistics of Lagrangian transport (e.g., in convective clouds or frontal systems). The model shall be developed as an open-source project in order to attract a large user community from different research fields.