ARL Weekly News – January 13, 2025

Publications and Presentations

Air Resources Laboratory at AMS

ARL scientists contributed nine posters and oral presentations and acted as session chairs for eight sessions:

Barry Baker Development of a MODIS/VIIRS Base Estimation of Lateral Cover for Low Vegetation: Applications to Dust and Land Surface Modeling within NOAA’s Air Composition Forecasts
Session Co-Chair: Surface-Atmosphere Exchanges, Interactions and Feedbacks
John Kochendorfer Intercomparison, Calibration and Uncertainties of Instrumentation II
Session Co-Chair: Innovative Technological Advances for Mesoscale Observing Systems
Session Co-Chair: Advances in Micrometeorological Measurements II
Lacey Holland Progress on Configurable ATmospheric Chemistry (CATChem) within NOAA’s Unified Forecast System (UFS)
Nebila Lichiheb Atmospheric ammonia measurements at a coastal site along the east coast of the USA
Praveena Krishnan Evaluation of Urban Heat Stress Response to Heatwaves in the Washington, DC Metro Area Using UrbanNet Observations
UrbanNet: The NOAA Air Resources Laboratory’s Urban Observing Program
Rick Saylor Session Co-Chair: Surface-Atmosphere Exchanges, Interactions and Feedbacks
Sreenath Paleri A generalized bulk parameterization approach for land-atmosphere heat fluxes
Temple Lee Heat and Turbulent Fluxes Within and Above a Forested Ridgetop Canopy
The Role of Different Meteorological Regimes on Surface-Layer Turbulence Characteristics Observed with a Wind Lidar Installed at a Forested Ridgetop
Parameterizing Heat and Moisture Fluxes using a New Three-Dimensional Turbulence Velocity Scale
Session Co-Chair: Integration of Observational Data in Forecasting and Numerical Weather Prediction Simulations
Session Chair: Integrating Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) into Meteorology
Session Chair: Advances in Micrometeorological Measurements II

Published in Ecological Modelling

Rick Saylor and co-authors published an article entitled “Dynamic Ammonia Exchange within a Mixed Deciduous Forest Canopy in the Southern Appalachians” in the journal Ecological Modelling.  In this work, in collaboration with colleagues at the U. S. EPA, ammonia concentration and flux measurements made in 2016 in a mixed deciduous forest at the western North Carolina Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory were analyzed using a multi-layer, one-dimensional column model with detailed canopy physics and bi-directional exchange. The results indicate that the formation of dew in the forest canopy during nighttime may play a significant role in the cycling of ammonia in this kind of ecosystem and that different levels within the canopy may simultaneously act as ammonia sources or sinks, depending on environmental conditions.  These findings suggest that a traditional “big-leaf” approach for emission/deposition may not be appropriate to model the dynamic behavior of ammonia within a forest ecosystem, re-emphasizing the potential importance of multilayer canopy models for use in large-scale atmospheric models.  For more information, contact Rick Saylor.

Accepted for publication in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology

A paper entitled, “The Influence of Drought on Heatwave Intensity, Duration, and Exposure” , was accepted for publication in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology on January 10, 2025.  The paper was led by Dr. Ronald Leeper from the NOAA Cooperative Institute for Satellite Earth System Studies (CISESS) in Asheville, NC; and ARL’s Dr. Howard Diamond in College Park, MD, was one of the co-authors.  The significance of the paper is that in the study it was found that droughts increase the risk of heat exposure when comparing compound (heat and drought) to non-compound heatwaves, particularly during the late afternoon to early evening periods. The increased exposure was driven more by droughts lengthening the duration of heatwaves rather than increasing their intensity. Soil moisture anomalies provided further clarity on the compounding effect as a more direct measure of deficits important to heatwave evolution than the all-drought type approach of the U.S. Drought Monitor.  This work will feed into a current study being conducted in using ARL’s U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) data to develop what is called an Aggregated Climate Extremes (ACE) index that will be able to use USCRN data to better characterize and quantify extreme climate events on a monthly and annual basis, both nationally and regionally in the US. 

Accepted for publication in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques

John Kochendofer is a co-author on a paper titled A Novel Assessment of the Vertical Velocity Correction for Non-orthogonal Sonic Anemometers that was accepted for publication in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques.