Sabbatical Report: Alex Kostinski, Physics, Feb. 10, 2010
I stayed at the Weizmann Institute, ESER, from October, 08 through January, 09 for nearly three continuous months. My host was Dr. Ilan Koren of the Department of Environmental Sciences. This has been a fruitful interaction with Ilan, his postdoctoral associate and 3 of his graduate students. Particularly useful have been our wide-ranging discussions concerning mineral-based tracking of atmospheric dust (lead author is the postdoctoral associate, Alexandra Chudnovsky), spatial statistics of cloud fields (lead author, graduate student Rotem Bar-Or), and analytical approximations in diffusional growth of cloud droplets (lead author, graduate student Amit Davidi). Judging by previous visits, most of these will result in joint journal articles.
Ilan Koren and I have jointly taught an interdisciplinary course on the Elements of Cloud Physics. While about a dozen students enrolled in it for credit, just as many sat in (along with a few postdocs, research associates and visiting professors) so the course appears to have been a popular success. In fact, various mutual interactions led Ilan, Dan Yakir (former department head), and myself to discuss to possibility of offering a core course or two in aspects of environmental science such as environmental thermodynamics. We are considering ways for me to return to ESER regularly for that purpose.
I also gave two seminars at ESER: one devoted to freezing of supercooled water drops and the other one to radiative transfer and climatic applications (presented during institute-wide workshop on open questions in atmospheric radiative transfer).
I have also worked with Yinon Rudich and his graduate student Ilya Taraniuk (we have published two Geophys. Res. Letters as a result of previous visits) and we obtained new results on film thickness of organically coated sea-slat particles as potentially important cloud condensation nuclei. I also initiated a new approach regarding optical properties of coated spheroidal particles.
Hezi Gildor, an oceanographer and faculty member at ESER, Erick Fredj (Lev college) and I have collaborated on the fluid dynamics problem concerning the gulf of Eilat. We have just published a paper on it (below). We also began working on the drifter problem and the entire collaboration has been remarkably fruitful.
In addition, I went to the Hebrew university of Jerusalem, to discuss joint work on the role of fluctuations in collisions of cloud droplets, with Professor Khain and Dr. Pinsky of the Earth Sciences Department and also gave a seminar there on supercooled water.
I also wrote two brief articles as a sole author for Environmental Research Letters.
Publications resulted from or finished while on the 1-semester sabbatical:
H Gildor, E Fredj & A Kostinski; The Gulf of Eilat/Aqaba: a Natural Driven Cavity? Geophysical & Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics, accepted for publication.
Chudnovsky A, Ben-Dor E, Kostinski AB, and Koren I., "Mineral content analysis of atmospheric dust using hyperspectral information from space", GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS Volume: 36, Article Number: L15811 Published: AUG 6 2009
G. Montero-Martinez, A. Kostinski, R. Shaw, F. Garcia-Garcia,"Do All Raindrops Fall at Terminal Speed?", Geophysical Research Letters, appeared June 2009.
A B Kostinski, "Drizzle rates versus cloud depths for marine stratocumuli", Environ. Res. Lett. 3 (2008) 045019 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/3/4/045019
A B Kostinski, "Simple approximations for condensational growth" Environ. Res. Lett. 4 (2009) 015005 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/4/1/015005
Taraniuk I, Kostinski A, Rudich, "Enrichment of surface-active compounds in coalescing cloud drops", GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 35, L19810, doi:10.1029/2008GL034973, 2008