"The BBOS Autumn Symposium 2021 was hosted by the Buys Ballot research school from the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research (IMAU) at the Utrecht University. Postgraduate students from Dutch universities gathered in person for three days in total to exchange about their scientific work related to the field of the physics of the climate system."

I attended the annual BBOS Autumn Symposium from Wednesday 20th till Friday 22nd October 2021, which took place in a location somewhere between Utrecht and Amersfoort in the Netherlands. This meeting is mainly conceived for postgraduate students and their supervisors to stimulate scientific exchange in the field of the physics of the climate system. Roughly a 100 people participated with in total ~ 30 talks and ~ 50 posters. The conference was divided thematically into the following five sessions: Atmospheric boundary layers, ocean and climate,
physics and chemistry of the atmosphere, coastal and shelf sea dynamics and the last session
about ice and climate. I was able to present my preliminary results of my PhD-project in a poster session related to the first session about ”Atmospheric Boundary Layers“, with the title: ”Of Direct Numerical Simulation of the Aerodynamically Rough Atmospheric Boundary Layer – Implementation of an Immersed Boundary Method for Turbulent Ekman Flow“. The poster was about the implementation of a numerical method to introduce roughness elements in the computational domain for simulating an idealized model of the earth’s boundary layer. This gave me the opportunity for some very interesting and revealing discussions with other scientists about my PhD-project.

I started my PhD-project beginning of this year. Therefore, due to the global pandemic, this conference gave me the first opportunity to meet scientists in my research field from other universities in person and exchange ideas about our research work, which led to many new impulses for my current and future research. I attended many different talks and broadened my horizon in field of climate science. However, I am very grateful for the invitation to this annual conference by the Buys Bullot research school and would like to thank the Graduate School of Geoscience for allowing me to attend this inspiring conference!

Jonathan Kostelecky
PhD student
Institute for Geophysics and Meteorology
Research Group: Turbulence in the boundary layer (JRG Ansorge)
PhD project: ”Intermittent Turbulence in the Atmospheric Boundary Layer with Heterogeneous
Surface Conditions “
Associated to the EU-funded project trainABL (”Turbulence-Resolving approaches to the intermittently
turbulent atmospheric boundary layer “).