ARL Weekly News – December 1, 2023

Recent Events

ARL Plays Key Role in U.S. Greenhouse Gas Measurement, Monitoring, and Information System

As announced by the White House today, NOAA is a key participant in the development of a national system aiming to monitor greenhouse gas emissions. This system will combine capabilities from NOAA and other federal agencies to better understand the emissions and removals of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from national to regional and urban scales as well as from a range of sources. NOAA’s Air Resources Laboratory’s (ARL) contribution is leading the development of an operational measurement and modeling system that quantifies GHGs emission sources in urban areas.

New HYSPLIT Version released

A new version of HYSPLIT was released on December 4, 2023. HYSPLIT v5.3.0 incorporates the following updates:

  • Add Freitas plume rise scheme.
  • Add the api2arl_v6 converter that reads scaledValueOfFirstFixedSurface for pressure levels.
  • Expand the CONCPLOT -c option to take the number of contours.
  • Add -c60 and -61 options to CONCPLOT that use intervals of sqrt(10).
  • Add +8 option to CONCPLOT for specifying near-min contour level.
  • Adjust the wind error flag by checking IDSP and ZICONTROLTF.
  • Update HYSPLITPLOT to version 0.9.1.
  • Replace STAMEN_TERRAIN and STAMEN_TONER map backgrounds with OPEN_STREET and OPEN_TOPO, respectively.
  • Arrays are allocated with zero initial values.
  • Updates to api2arl_v5 converter.
  • Display message when no plume is drawn.
  • Updates to XML generation for KML XSD compliance.
  • CONPROB prints an error message when no input files are present.
  • CONPROB works with concentration grids of different sizes, provided grid spacings remain the same across concentration grids.
  • Updates to PARTICLE.DAT and PARTICLE_STILT.DAT formats.
  • Increase the number of vertical levels to 99.
  • ARW2ARL -b option can take up to 4 digits.
  • Add -d option to CONAVGPD.
  • Bug fix with updating internal vertical coordinate after advection.
  • Bug fix with updating time averaging wind for backward runs.
  • Bug fix with initializing variables for Grell convection.
  • Bug fix with plotting vertical projection trajectories.
  • Bug fix with creating KML when initial plot frames are empty.
  • Bug fix with creating KML for concentration-to-station via GUI.
  • Bug fix with extracting station via graphical user interface.
  • Bug fix with setting lat lon domains for DATA_DEL.
  • Bug fix with clustering trajectories via graphical user interface.
  • Use wget instead of ftp when downloading meteorological data files with Windows PC.

Media Mentions

Salon.com article quotes ARL’s Howard Diamond: Thanks to climate change, Autumn will never be the same

USAToday also quoted him in a separate fact check piece: Global warming is from human activity, not sea volcanos or El Niño | Fact check