Petra Klein

Back to People Page

Contact Information

General Information

Dr. Klein's main area of research is Micrometeorology with a focus on urban meteorology, in particular, investigating flow, turbulence and dispersion patterns in cities. Additionally, she has also studied the influence of vegetation on the microclimate in rural areas and investigated tropospheric ozone pollution as well as dispersion of pollutants in convective boundary layers. Already her PhD research, completed in 1999 at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, was motivated by air pollution problems related to increasing traffic emissions in cities. During her Post-Doc years at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich (1999-2000), she then participated in the European Union Project "Optimisation of Modelling Methods for Air Pollution in Streets" (TRAPOS). She actively collaborated with researchers from different European universities and research centers, and developed parameterizations that resulted in significant improvements of air quality models for urban areas. After joining the School of Meteorology (SoM) at the University of Oklahoma, she collaborated with Dr. Michael Brown from the Los Alamos National Laboratories, on the evaluation and improvement of the urban fast-response model QUIC, and she was also a member of the science team for the largest urban tracer experiment conducted to this date, the Joint Urban 2003 Experiment, which took place in July 2003 in Oklahoma City. During this experiment she operated two towers each equipped with five sonic anemometers in a OKC downtown street canyon and analyzed the influence of atmospheric stability on urban canopy layer flow and turbulence. In 2006, Dr Klein received the NSF career award "Development of an Innovative Laboratory for Research and Education in Urban Meteorology (ILREUM)" and has been the lead investigator of several smaller urban measurement campaigns focusing on increasing the knowledge about turbulent heat and momentum transfer within the urban canopy layer.