ARL Weekly News – June 17, 2022
| Upcoming Events |
House Science Committee Hearing
On Thursday June 23, at 10 AM ET, Dr. Ariel Stein, director of NOAA’s Air Resources Lab and acting director of NOAA’s Global Monitoring lab, will join other federal agency officials to testify for the House Science Committee’s Subcommittees on Research and Technology and Environment about how federal programs are measuring greenhouse gas sources and sinks.
Balloon Launch planned to understand fire plumes transport
In conjunction with ARL’s Chemical Modeling and Emissions group, the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) ASH group, and the TOLNet – Tropospheric Ozone LiDAR Network group, a future model verification study is planned to understand forest fire plumes through floating balloon payloads and ozone LiDAR observations. Developed by atmospheric science and engineering students at (UAH) the “Smart Balloon” platform is able to attain any floating altitude of its choosing. Using wind trajectories calculated with HYSPLIT’s Balloon Forecasting Tool, the Smart Balloon can essentially drive to an area of interest in the atmosphere. When a smoke transport event is of interest, the Smart Balloon PM2.5 platform will be deployed with support from TOLNet’s Rocket-city Ozone (O3) Quality Evaluation in the Troposphere (RO3QET) mobile lidar platform. Both platforms will observe fine scale temporal and spatial gradients of forest fire smoke transport events across the CONUS domain for future NOAA/NWS National Air Quality Forecast Capability model evaluation studies.
