ARL Weekly News – June 22, 2018

HQ
A paper titled ”Top-down Estimates of NOx and CO Emissions from Washington, D.C.-Baltimore During the WINTER Campaign,” co-authored by Olivia Salmon, Paul Shepson, Xinrong Ren et al., has been accepted for publication in Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres. The paper presents emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO) from airborne mass balance experiments around the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore area in February-March 2015 during the Wintertime INvestigation of Transport, Emissions, and Reactivity (WINTER) campaign. The study found that National Emissions Inventory (NEI) NOx is consistent with the observations, but the NEI overestimates CO emissions by factor of 2 in Washington, D.C.-Baltimore. Wintertime CO/NOx and CO/CO2 enhancement ratios are variable and lower than those reported by past studies, while wintertime NOx/CO2 enhancement ratios are consistent with inventories.

ATDD
Rick Saylor (ATDD) and Barry Baker (HQ) visited with scientists at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, New Jersey, on June 21-22. Dr. Saylor presented a seminar entitled “Surface-Atmosphere Exchange: Beyond Emissions and Deposition” outlining recent research activities and suggesting potential areas of collaboration between ARL and GFDL. Follow on discussions with GFDL scientists identified several topics in surface-atmosphere exchange and land surface modeling that will be explored over the next few months.

Temple Lee and Michael Buban attended the Marena, Oklahoma, In Situ Sensor Testbed (MOISST) workshop held in Lincoln, Nebraska from 4-7 June. At this meeting, Michael gave a talk entitled “Using Climate Reference Network (CRN) data in the development of a gridded nationwide soil moisture product.” Temple and Michael then attended the Boundary Layers and Turbulence meeting in Oklahoma City from 11-15 June, where they shared recent research results from the Land Atmosphere Feedback Experiment (LAFE). Temple’s talk was on the evaluation of Monin-Obukhov similarity functions using the LAFE datasets, and Michael spoke about recent idealized numerical simulations.

John Kochendorfer presented two talks at the 52nd Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Congress, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. One was titled, “Eddy covariance fluxes using a new low-cost relative humidity sensor,” by Kochendorfer J., T. Lee, R. Dobosy, M. Buban, and B. Baker. It described testing of a fast-response relative humidity probe performed at ATDD. The other was titled, “The testing and development of transfer functions for tipping-bucket precipitation gauges in WMO-SPICE” (World Meteorological Organization-Solid Precipitation Inter-Comparison Experiment). It described recent progress made regarding the methods used to derive transfer function for tipping bucket precipitation gauges. John Kochendorfer also co-authored two other talks given at the same meeting. One was titled, “WMO-SPICE: overview, methods, and Canadian perspective.” The other was titled, “Post-SPICE transfer function validation.”