ARL Weekly News – June 8, 2018

SORD
James Wood and Rick Lantrip participated in an emergency response exercise as the Consequence Assessment Team (CAT) for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Nevada Field Office (NFO). The exercise was conducted on the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS). In this event, the activities to be conducted were discussed, local weather data and weather forecasts were provided, and dispersion products were generated based on the worst case event information provided for the scenario. In addition, the CAT worked with field measurement teams to help identify/locate the plume. These events were conducted with the Department of Energy (DOE)/NNSA/NFO Emergency Response Organization. Dispersion and Consequence. Walt Schalk participated as an Exercise Controller/Evaluator for the CAT.

Walt Schalk prepared briefings, finalized the agenda, and conducted a DOE Meteorological Coordinating Council (DMCC) meeting held in conjunction with the Emergency Management Issues – Special Interest Group (EMI-SIG) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The meeting consisted of: a round robin update of program status of those in attendance, a discussion on the path forward with the new DOE Order 151.1D and a discussion about assessing the order’s requirements, recent DMCC activities and projects, site met program discussions, DOE HQ activities, and a discussion regarding observations from a site exercise that used a smoke pot to simulate a release and the representativeness of the local weather tower. Walt also prepared and briefed the EMI-SIG Steering Committee on current and future activities.

Rick Lantrip, James Wood, Wayne Bailey, and Walt Schalk install a temporary weather station on the NNSS Area 2 to support future experimental activities.

FRD
Bai Yang has been working with Will Pendergrass at ATDD on comparing observations from FRD’s flux station at the Idaho National Laboratory with output from NOAA’s operational forecast models. Will is already performing similar comparisons using observations from the Chestnut Ridge station near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and posting the results on the web. A similar web display will be set up for the Idaho data.

HQ
Flash Leaflet maps: This week the READY HYSPLIT website interface was updated to allow the HYSPLIT results to be displayed on a JavaScript Leaflet open source mapping application. The updates were necessary to meet a June 5 deadline when support ended for the mapping software used in current versions of the interface. Most of the functionality of the previous application has been adopted in the new application and work continues to add more capabilities.