ARL Weekly News – April 9, 2021

Upcoming Events

National Air Quality Forecast Capability Delivery Begins.
ARL is finalizing delivery of the upgrade to the  National Air Quality Forecast Capability (AQM v6.0 Upgrade; GFSv16-NACC-CMAQv5.3.1) to NWS. The upgrade is expected to go into operation this summer and will extend current air quality forecasting ability to 72 hours, up from 48.  With the development of the NOAA-EPA Atmospheric Chemistry Coupler (NACC), the NWS and community users benefit by using the GFSv16 forecasts to drive the NAQFC.

Lidar Installation Begins

Installation is underway this week to add a Lidar to the DCNet instrumentation on the roof of the Hoover Building in DC.  The testbed is designed to isolate the anthropogenic GHG emissions in urban areas along the U.S. East Coast from other sources (cities, oil and gas development, coal mines, and power plants).  A NOAA research story to follow.

Outreach and Public Engagement: Boys and Girls Club of America

LaToya Myles filmed an introduction to a Boys and Girls Club of America contest for Earth Day, April 22.  Students from ages 10-12 will complete an activity to learn about their ecological footprint, then design a poster. LaToya will then judge the poster competition that is designed to encourage viewers to reduce their ecological footprint by taking a specific action.

Outreach and Public Engagement: Climate Change Talks for Middle School

Dr. Howard Diamond will be giving a series of four half-hour virtual talks on climate change science and his work career as a climate scientist at NOAA to approximately 300 8th grade students at Old Mill Middle School South in Millersville, MD in Anne Arundel County Maryland from April 15-16.  Dr. Diamond was contacted by the STEM Coordinator at the school as a result of a recommendation from a retired NOAA employee that they both know.

Recent Events

Papers Accepted for Publication

Christopher P. Loughner, Ariel F. Stein, John C. Lin: Incorporating features from the Stochastic Time-Inverted Lagrangian Transport (STILT) model into the Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT) model: a unified dispersion model for time-forward and time-reversed applications; accepted for publication in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology.

Ge, Y., X. Shi, Y. Ma, W. Zhang, X. Ren, J. Zheng, and Y. Zhang, Seasonality of ambient nitrous acid near a typical industry zone in the Yangtze River Delta region of China: Formation mechanisms and its contribution to the atmospheric oxidation capacity, Atmos. Environ., in press, 2021.