ARL Weekly News – July 20, 2018

HQ
WMO RSMC Dispersion Modeling Development: Glenn Rolph has been nominated to lead the effort to complete work on implementing the Transfer Coefficient Matrix (TCM) application developed at ARL for use within the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Emergency Response Activities Program. The TCM application will allow more flexibility by all WMO Regional Specialized Meteorological Centers (RSMCs) in the use and comparison of their dispersion model results, of which NCEP and ARL are members of RSMC Washington. Glenn will also attend the WMO Commission of Basic Systems’ Expert Team on Emergency Response Activities meeting in Vienna, Austria, from October 1 to 5, 2018 to discuss the progress on the work and how the other RSMCs can post their results to the developmental web server at ARL. RSMCs provide atmospheric dispersion model products to WMO member countries and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) during nuclear accident exercises and emergencies to model the transport of nuclear material from the source of the release.

FRD
The editors at the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres have selected the paper “Distinct Turbulence Structures in Stably Stratified Boundary Layers with Weak and Strong Surface Shear” to be featured as a Research Spotlight in EOS. Dennis Finn is a coauthor on this paper, with Heping Liu at Washington State University being the first author. The Research Spotlight will include an image to accompany the text. Since this paper is based on turbulence observations collected at FRD’s field research area located at the Idaho National Laboratory, the image may be a photograph of FRD’s Grid 3 tower or other equipment within the area. The observations used for this paper were part of a collaboration between Washington State University and FRD related to a series of tracer studies called Project Sagebrush.