Abstract
Updrafts in the daytime convective boundary layer play a central role in transporting heat, moisture, and momentum over complex terrain, yet their spatial and temporal characteristics remain poorly understood in regions lacking intensive observational campaigns. This dissertation advances understanding of updraft patterns over the Appalachian Mountains—a humid, densely forested environment with modest topographic relief that has received little boundary layer research attention. Three approaches are applied to the Rockfish Valley in the central Virginia Blue Ridge. First, the WeatherViz Station Archivist, an open-source framework for retrieving, quality-controlling, and visualizing personal weather station data, is developed and used to classify valley wind days across the Rockfish Valley and Owens Valley, California, establishing one of the first multi-season valley wind climatologies for a central Appalachian valley. Second, field campaigns combining Doppler wind lidar, radiosondes, and recreational sailplane GPS tracks reveal that usable thermal updrafts appear two to three hours after the morning surface wind reversal and cluster preferentially along ridgelines where slope-flow convergence is strongest. Third, convection-resolving Weather Research and Forecasting model simulations at 56 m grid spacing reproduce discrete convective plumes and show that horizontal convergence serves as a reliable proxy for updraft location during thermally-driven regimes but decouples from vertical velocity maxima under mechanically-forced westerly conditions, where mountain wave activity and windward deflection become the dominant mechanisms for ascending motion. These findings demonstrate that terrain geometry is the primary factor organizing updrafts in this humid, forested valley. More broadly, the multi-platform framework and open-source tools developed here lower the barriers to entry for boundary layer research, demonstrating that crowdsourced data and cost-effective instrumentation can advance understanding of atmospheric phenomena in understudied mountainous regions.
