Identification

Title

Lee waves Associated with a commercial jetliner accident at Denver International Airport

Abstract

At 1818 mountain standard time 20 December 2008, a Boeing 737 jetliner encountered significant crosswinds while accelerating for takeoff at the Denver International Airport (DIA), ran off the side of the runway, and burst into flames. Passengers and crew were able to evacuate quickly, and, although there were injuries, there were no fatalities. Winds around the time of the accident were predominantly from the west, with substantial spatial and temporal speed variability across the airport property. Embedded in this mostly westerly flow were intermittent gusts that created strong crosswinds for the north-south runways. According to the report from the National Transportation Safety Board, it was one of these strong gusts that initiated the events that led to the runway excursion and subsequent crash of the aircraft. Numerous aircraft reported significant mountain-wave activity and turbulence over Colorado on the day of the accident. To determine whether wave activity may have contributed to the strong, intermittent gustiness at DIA, a high-resolution multinested numerical simulation was performed using the Clark-Hall model, with a horizontal grid spacing of 250 m in the inner domain. Results from this simulation suggest that the surface gustiness at DIA was associated with undulations in a train of lee waves in a midtropospheric stable layer above the airport, creating regions of higher-velocity air descending toward the surface. In contrast, a simulation with horizontal grid spacing that was similar to that of a state-of-the-art operational forecast model (3 km) did not predict strong winds at DIA.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7qf8v3v

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2015-07-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Copyright 2015 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact