ARL Weekly News – April 6, 2018

ATDD
Temple Lee, Randy White, and Michael Buban conducted an outreach activity on 28 March for over 100 sixth grade earth science students from Rockwood Middle School in Rockwood, TN. Randy showed and discussed many of the weather instruments used in the field, and Temple and Michael performed a weather balloon launch. The teachers are using the data collected from the weather balloon launch to complement their current unit on the weather.

On 5 April, Temple Lee, Ed Dumas, and Michael Buban conducted a small field study evaluating the performance of their new eMote sensors by releasing them from the DJI S-1000 small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS) at a nearby testbed. When large numbers of eMotes are released from a fixed-wing aircraft, sUAS, or balloon, they can be used as semi-Lagrangian drifters and will ultimately provide important information on three-dimensional temperature, moisture, and wind fields by transmitting these data to a ground receiver. The tests on 5 April will help motivate improvements in sensor design and data acquisition.

FRD
Brad Reese and Dennis Finn continue to work on updates to web interfaces used to run the HYSPLIT model and display its output. Such updates are needed due to the reliance of the existing interfaces on the Flash browser plugin and to changes in licensing for commercial mapping software such as MapQuest and Google Maps. Working prototypes of new interfaces are now available both for the HYRad modeling system used at FRD to support the interagency agreement with DOE-Idaho and for the Web Operations Center (WOC) version of HYSPLIT used operationally within NOAA. These prototypes use the Leaflet open-source mapping software and are written in standard Javascript and HTML5 code.