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Perdigão-2017 is a large field experiment and a large collaboration among European and U.S. research groups. It is is one of a set of field experiments carried out within an European project, called the New European Wind Atlas (NEWA), driven by the research needs of the European wind industry to assess the potential for wind energy resources across Europe.

The US research science team is made up of about a dozen universities and instrument facilities under the umbrella of the Perdigão Experiment. Further groups join the Experiment funded their national sources. Given the complex orographic features of the site, this field experiment offers the opportunity for collaboration among European and U.S. groups, increasing the number and diversity of scientific equipment available to the field experiment and enabling measurements at unprecedented detail in both spatial and temporal scales. The two projects combined offer an unprecedented opportunity to characterize atmospheric physics over a wide range of conditions. The major outcome of this endeavor will be an experimental database of unprecedented detail and diversity to characterize the flow regime in this domain and a become a source of useful information for research and operational wind assessment for many years to come.

Principal Investigator

Joe Fernando

Harindra Joe Fernando
Wayne and Diana Murdy Endowed Professor

Biography

Fernando received his BSc in Mechanical Engineering (1979) from the University of Sri Lanka and MS (1982) and PhD (1983) in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics from the Johns Hopkins University. He received post-doctoral training in environmental engineering sciences at California Institute of Technology (1983-84). During 1984-2009, he was affiliated with the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at Arizona State University, ASU (Assistant Professor 1984-87; Associate Professor 88-92; Professor 1992-2009. In 1994, Fernando was appointed as the founding Director of the Center for Environmental Fluid Dynamics, a position he held until 2009, while holding a co-appointment with the School of Sustainability (200-09). In 2010 January he joined University of Notre Dame as Wayne and Diana Murdy Endowed Professor of Engineering and Geosciences, with the primary affiliation in the Department of Civil Engineering & Geological Sciences and a joint appointment with the Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering. He is a concurrent Professor in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics.

Among awards and honors he received are the UNESCO Gold Medal for the Best Engineering Student of the Year (1979), Presidential Young Investigator Award (NSF, 1986), ASU Alumni Distinguished Research Award (1997), Rieger Foundation Distinguish Scholar Award in Environmental Sciences (2001), William Mong Lectureship from the University of Hong Kong (2004) and Life Time Achievement Award from the Sri Lanka Foundation of the USA (2007). He is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), American Physical Society (APS), American Meteorological Society (AMS) and American Association for Advancement in Science (AAAS). He was elected to the European Academy in 2009 and was awarded Doctor Honoris Causa by the Universite Joseph Fourier (University of Grenoble, France) in 2014 and Doctor of Laws, Honoris Causa by the University of Dundee in 2016.

In 2007, he was featured in the New York Times, International Herald Tribune and a dozen of international news media for his work on hydrodynamics of beach defenses. In closing the year 2008, the Arizona Republic Newspaper honored him by including in “Tempe Five Who Matter” -- one of the five residents who have made a notable difference in the life of the city, in recognition of his work on Phoenix Urban Heat Island. He has held visiting professorships at the University of Cambridge (UK), ETH (Zurich), University of Toulon (France), Tel Aviv University (Israel) and University of Girona (Spain). Fernando was an AWU fellow at the Solar Energy Research Institute (1987-89) and a visiting scientist at the British Meteorological Office (1991-96).

He has served on numerous national and international committees and panels, more recently on the Sumatra Tsunami Survey Panel (NSF, 2005), Louisiana Coastal Area Science and Technology Board (2006-2011), the American Geophysical Union Committee on Natural Disasters (2006), National Science Foundation Environmental Science and Engineering Advisory Committee (2012-2016) and Bay Delta Independent Science Board, State of California (2012-2017). He serves on the editorial boards of Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics (Editor, 1997-), IAHR Journal of Hydro-Environment (Associate Editor, 2007-2014; editorial board member 2014-), EGS Journal of Non-Linear Processes in Geophysics (Editor, 2010-) and Physics Reviews Fluids (2016-). He also served as an associate editor of Physics of Fluids (2013-2015) and Applied Mechanics Reviews (1989-2006. Currently, he is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal, Environmental Fluid Dynamics.

He has published more than 275 archival papers spanning some 55 different International Journals, covering basic fluid dynamics, experimental methods, oceanography, atmospheric sciences, environmental sciences and engineering, air pollution, alternative energy sources, acoustics, heat transfer and hydraulics, river and fluids engineering. He edited two volumes of Environmental Fluid Dynamics Handbook (Taylor Francis), a volume on Human Health and National Security Implications of Climate Change (Springer), and Double Diffusive Convection (AGU).

Recently, he has been an investigator of four large multidisciplinary research projects funded by the Office of Naval Research: the Principal Investigator of Mountain Terrain Atmospheric Modeling and Observations – MATERHORN – Program, www.nd.edu/~dynamics/materhorn); the Principal Scientist for the ASIRI – Air-sea Interactions in Northern Indian Ocean (2012-2017); the Principal Investigator of ASIRI: Remote Sensing of Atmospheric Waves and Instabilities, RAWI (2014-2017); and a co-Principal Investigator of the Coupled Air-Sea Interactions and Electromagnetic Ducting, CASPER (2014-2019). He also leads the US component of an international project dubbed Perdigão, funded by the National Science Foundation (2016-19). Also, currently, he is the Principal Investigator of the WFIP-2 (Wind Forecasting and Improvement Project, Phase 2) Project funded by the Department of Energy and a freeway acoustic project funded by the Arizona Department of Transportation.

Related web page: http://www3.nd.edu/~dynamics/

USA Team

Usa Team
  • Dr. Julie Lundquist (University of Colorado)
  • Dr. Petra Klien (University of Oklahoma)
  • Dr. Tina Katapodes Chow (University of Berkley)
  • Dr. Chris Hocut & Edward Creegen (Army Research Laboratory)
  • Dr. Steve Oncley (National Center of Atmospheric Research)

Notre Dame Team

Notre Dame Team
  • Dr. Harindra Joseph Fernando (Professor)
  • Dr. Laura Leo (Research Assistant Professor)
  • Dr. Raghu Krishnamurthy (Research Scientist)
  • Orson Hyde (Field Technician)
  • Daniel Vassallo (PhD Student)
  • Sebastian Otarola-Bustos (PhD Student)
  • Numan Sirin (PhD Student)
  • John Salvadore (Undergraduate Student)
  • Luis Fernandez (Undergraduate Student)

International Team

  • Dr. Margarida S. Belo (IPMA, Portugal)
  • Dr. Michael Courtney (DTU, Denmark)
  • Dr. Thomas Gerz (DLR, Germany)
  • Dr. Jakob Mann (DTU, Denmark)
  • Dr. Jose-Carlos Matos (INEGI, Portugal)
  • Dr. Jose Palma (University of Porto, Portugal)
  • Dr. Nikola Vasiljevic (DTU, Denmark)
  • Dr. Norman Wildman (DLR, Germany)

Program Management