Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences

James Forrestal Campus, a 1,600 acre complex off U.S. 1 and three miles from main campus, is the home of the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS). The campus comprises three research facilities, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL),  Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), and the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) department's Gas Dynamics and Fluid Mechanics Laboratory.

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, managed by Princeton University and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, is a collaborative national center for plasma and fusion science. PPPL scientists experiment with fusion as an energy source for the world, and conduct research along the broad frontier of plasma science and technology.

GFDL meteorologists explore the intricacies of modeling weather and climate with supercomputers, including a cluster of massively-parallel SGI Origin and Altix computers.  The computing facilities at GFDL include an Altix cluster of 8000 processors with a peak performance of 50 teraflops, attached to 515TB of near-line storage and 17PB of tape archive. Access to these facilities is through a network of Linux workstations.

At the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, researchers conduct experiments in super-sonic aerodynamics with a battery of state-of-the-art blow-down wind tunnels. Their main activities in the lab include:

• Supersonic and hypersonic turbulent boundary layers and shock-wave interactions
• High Reynolds number boundary layers and wakes
• Unsteady propulsion and the hydrodynamics of swimming