ARL Weekly News – April 15, 2022

ARL Assists Students Exploring Mobile Apps to Achieve Climate Goals

Since 2017, the Women of AT&T and Technology Association of Georgia has worked to put communities and their local Police Officers and other first responders together with technologists through an initiative to create mobile technology concepts to help us all be safer. For the session on April 19th, Dr. Howard Diamond was asked, and then served as a climate expert advisor to a United Nations Sustainable Development Goals competition that is sponsored by the Women of AT&T’s initiative. At that session, 40 high school students from the German School of Barcelona, Spain, who are competing for scholarships were divided up into eight teams of five with the goal of developing mobile technology apps to assist with climate change mitigation and adaptation. Dr. Diamond’s role was to provide a sounding board for ideas from the eight teams and to answer specific questions related to climate. He was asked to do this via his role with fielding public inquiries for NOAA’s Climate Portal. The students asked a number of very good questions with respect to the effects of CO2 and climate change and had some good ideas about possible apps such as one that would work to monitor a person’s personal carbon footprint and make suggestions to the person on ways to minimize that footprint based on the activities being tracked. Dr. Diamond was impressed by the quality of the students’ questions and their seriousness in wanting to address this vital international issue; he left his e-mail address with them in case they wanted to follow-up with any further inquiries.

Mauna Loa Observatory Visit
From April 13 to 18, 2022 Paul Kelly, Phil Stratton, and Xinrong Ren visited the NOAA Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO) on the island of Hawaii to perform a maintenance visit to the Atmospheric Mercury Network (AMNet) mercury monitoring site. The mercury and trace gas instruments were serviced and calibrated. They communicated with the site operator regarding some modifications for the instruments made during the visit. Some construction work has been scheduled at the MLO this summer that will affect the mercury measurement system, so they also discussed with the MLO staff about relocation of our mercury external units and the potential to move the entire measurement system to another building. Winston Luke helped coordinate the visit with the staff at the MLO and develop the task list for this visit. The visit is essential to improve the mercury and trace gas data quality.