ARL Weekly News – August 14, 2020.
| Recent Events. |
NOAA Leadership Seminar
Dr. LaToya Myles will deliver an invited presentation during the 2020 Virtual NOAA Leadership Seminar (NLS). Her presentation entitled Adjusting the Sails: Creativity and Flexibility in Times of Change is scheduled for Wednesday, August 19 at 4:00 pm ET. She was a member of the 2019 NLS Class. Participants in NLS this year will learn about the ability to bring about strategic change, both within and outside the organization, to meet organizational goals.
Authoritative Climate Report Features Chapter Edited by ASMD’s Howard Diamond
Dr. Howard Diamond, Climate Science Program Manager at ARL’s Atmospheric Sciences Modeling Division (ASMD), served as lead editor for the Tropics chapter in “The State of the Climate in 2019,” released on August 12th (see https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/reporting-state-climate-2019) as a special supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. This annual summer publication is based on contributions from scientists worldwide and compiled by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. It provides a detailed update on global climate indicators, notable weather events, and other data collected by environmental monitoring stations and instruments, earning it the fond nickname of “the annual checkup for our planet.” This year’s report boasts contributions from over 520 scientists from over 60 countries and also marks a 14-year editorial milestone for Dr. Diamond, whose involvement began while he was developing a climatology of tropical cyclones in the southwest Pacific as part of his PhD studies. Tropical cyclones remain one of Diamond’s climate specialties to this day, and he stresses the importance of documenting tropical, and all climate information, on an annual basis in a systematic and peer-reviewed fashion for the long-term record.
Dr. Diamond manages the ARL’s United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN) program, comprised of nearly 140 climate monitoring stations spanning the conterminous U.S., Alaska, and Hawaii. “Climate change is an important societal issue,” he says, and “long-term, well-calibrated, global observations of essential climate variables such as air temperature, rainfall, and sea-surface temperature (to name just a few) are critical for monitoring the evolving state of the Earth’s climate.” Observations, particularly those enabled by the USCRN for air temperature, precipitation, and soil moisture, and soil temperature, provide the basis for understanding the causes of long-term climate change and the interrelationships between climate and societal activities. Climate observations are needed to address a large range of important societal issues including sea level rise, droughts, floods, extreme heat events, food security, and freshwater availability in the coming decades. The USCRN provides a key input to the data (in addition to a number of other in-situ and satellite observing systems) used to evaluate the climate for the U.S. during 2019 that is part of the chapter on regional climate in the overall report.
To read the full report, please visit https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/publications/bulletin-of-the-american-meteorological-society-bams/state-of-the-climate/. The Tropics chapter can be accessed directly at https://journals.ametsoc.org/bams/article-pdf/101/8/S185/4988917/bamsd200077.pdf; and the regional climate chapter can be found at https://journals.ametsoc.org/bams/article-pdf/101/8/S321/4988913/2020bamsstateoftheclimate_chapter7.pdf.