ARL Weekly News – April 12, 2019

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Xinrong Ren attended the Energy-Related Air Quality and Health Effects Research Workshop and Long Island Sound Tropospheric Ozone Study (LISTOS) Meeting in Albany, New York from April 9-11, 2019. He gave a talk titled “Ozone Production and Its Sensitivity to NOx and VOCs during LISTOS 2018” and presented some results on aircraft observations from the LISTOS Study in summer 2018. During the meeting, he also met with some colleagues from NOAA’s Earth System Research Lab, NASA’s Langley Research Center, Stony Brook University, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and the City College of New York to discuss possible collaboration on several research topics.

ARL’s Dr. Ariel Stein and Dr. Tom Pierce, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Associate Director for Science, National Exposure Research Laboratory Computational Exposure Division, kicked off a one-day (April 8) scientist-to-scientist summit on atmospheric chemistry modeling at EPA’s Headquarters in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. ARL’s Pius Lee, Daniel Tong, Youhua Tang, Barry Baker and Patrick Campbell participated in person and Tianfeng Chai joined remotely. The morning sessions comprised of alternating presentation between ARL and EPA scientists. An audience of 40 plus scientists enthusiastically showed relevant works related to air chemistry modeling in multiple temporal and spatial scales. Both the ARL and EPA teams presented work on global and regional air chemistry simulations. ARL focused on processes within the planetary boundary layer and aim to improve air chemistry forecasts over the U.S. in a time scale from days to a couple tens of days (i.e. of sub-seasonal and seasonal scales). EPA’s global models focus on decadal to multiple year scales on climate modifications due to air chemistry. Both teams showed that there exists a two-way feedback mechanism between air composition and atmospheric dynamics: weather. In the afternoon break-out discussion sessions, with approximately 20 scientists in each of the two sessions, discussed collaborative opportunities to improve pollutant emission modeling, air chemistry for particulate matter, and coupling between global and regional atmospheric models.