Petra Klein
Biography
Dr. Klein earned a Diploma (1993) in Physics and PhD in Civil Engineering (1999) degrees from the University of Karlsruhe. From 1999 to 2000 she was a Post-Doc at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland where she worked on the European Project TRAPOS that focused on the disperions of tarddic emissions in street canyons. She moved to Norman, OK in January 2001 to take a position as Visiting Assistant Professor in Civil Engineering and Environmental Science at the Univeristy of Oklahoma before she joined the School of Meteorology as tenure-track faculty member in 2002. A copy of her CV can be found here.
Dr. Klein’s activities include:
- She currently serves as PI of an NSF Collaborative Research grant that focuses on investigating the structure and evolution of low-level jets in the nocturnal stable boundary layer and their interactions with mesoscale atmospheric disturbances. The study is part of the PECAN (Plains Elevated Convection at Night) project and the OU BLISS team operated the OU Collaborative Lower Atmospheric Mobile Profiling System (CLAMPS) in the US Central Plains in summer 2015.
- She was a Co-PI on an NSF MRI grant that focused on the development of a unique mobile thermodynamic and dynamic profiling system, OU CLAMPS, which includes an Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (AERI), a microwave radiometer, a scanning Doppler wind lidar, and a surface meteorological system on a deployable mast (2012-2015).
- In 2012 and 2013, Dr. Klein served as Co-PI on 2 Lower Atmospheric Boundary Layer Experiments (LABLE) at the Southern Great Plains Site of the DOE ARM program in Oklahoma. She and her students deployed multiple Lidars to study the structure of the nocturnal boundary layer and to investigate its impacts on wind energy resources.
- Earlier in her career, she was the recipient of the NSF Career award ILREUM, which focused on the development of an innovative laboratory for research and education in urban meteorology and a member of the science team of the urban flow and tracer experiment ‘Joint Urban 2003 (JU2003)” which took place in Oklahoma City during July 2003. The data sets from these projects have led to new discoveries about flow, turbulence, and dispersion processes in cities and are still being analyzed.
Contact Information
Office: NWC 5339
Phone: (405) 325-1631
E-Mail: pkklein@ou.edu
Research Interests
- boundary layer meteorology
- tropospheric pollution problems
- flow and turbulence characteristics in urban areas
- wind-tunnel modeling of geophysical flow phenomena
- atmospheric measurement techniques
- stable boundary layers
- low-level jets