AuthorsPage

Fernando Caracena, PhD, physicist (19 Sept. 2011)

copyright 14 June 2010 by Fernando Caracena
Boulder, CO

Having seen pieces of my former webpages at NOAA dissappear bit by bit after I retired from there, I am starting my own web site. The portions of the old webpage that remain relate to microbursts, a weather phenomena in which I did some pioneering research with the late Dr. Ted T. Fujita. I was attracted independantly to this line of research by a microburst-related aircraft accident that happend at Denver's old Stapleton International Airport when an airliner took off beneath a high-based shower. My analysis of the weather situation over the airport was largely reposible for convincing the NTSB that this was a weather-related accident, which was produced by windsears that exceeded the performance capability of the aircraft. This type of weather phenomenon, which was generically named a downburst by Fujita, is discussed in a Wikipedia article. Fujita called small-scale downbursts, microbursts. After the Denver accident, I visited the University of Chicago, where Fujita and I collaborated on research that resulted in a landmark paper [Tetsuya T. Fujita and Fernando Caracena, 1977: "An analysis of three weather-related aircraft accidents." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 58: 1164–1181], which was judged to be one of the "Significant Papers from the First 50 Years of the Boulder Labs"[NISTIR 6618 and NTIA SP-04-416: Edited by M.E. DeWeese , M.A. Luebs and H.L. McCullough].

I have included a short resume of my professional life below, a more extended one can be accessed here.

Education:

PhD and MA in physics from Case Western University
BS from The University of Texas at EL Paso

Research interests:
    • Computational Physics and graphics using visualization
    • microbursts
    • flash floods

Some work and publications:
    • (Barnes et al.) on the necessity of filtering high resolution model output
        before doing quasi-geostrophic (QG) computations.
    • (Caracena and Marroquin) on the relation between areas of turbulence and
        upper-atmospheric frontal zones.
    • ballon management simulations using NCEP/NCAR reanalisis data for
        the GAINS project.
    • (Caracena, Barnes and Marroquin) A Study of Gravity Waves Generated
        by Convective Systems in ETA model Forecasts -
        Meterolology and Atmospheric Physics, ca. October, 1998.

Foreign Travel:
    • Spent one month in Europe the summer of 1960.
    • In February 1998 I gave two Invited talks at the
       Asamblea Hispano-Portugues de Geofisica y Geodisia. in Aguadulce, Almeria, Spain

Languages besides English
•     Spanish
•     French
•     Latin
•     Smattering of German

Personal interests:
    • Reading books;
    • Classical music (Bach is at the top of my list);
    • Amateur artist;
    • Photography;
    • Genealogy: researching my family ancestry as part of history. There is a town in Soria, Old Castile, Spain from where my surname is derived.
   I have an interesting and illustrious family background;
    • Gardening;
    • Hiking in the high country.
    • Fly fishing;

E-mail: author@ghyzmo.com

Modified 3 December 2011