ARL Weekly News – March 2, 2018

HQ
Drs. Rick Saylor and Pius Lee were invited to lead editing a special issue in Atmosphere, a well-known online journal in air chemistry and atmosphere’s forcing by surface and radiation. Their special issue has concluded with publication of 13 articles including an editorial by Lee and Saylor: “Air quality monitoring and forecasting” (available at: http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/9/3/89/pdf). The editorial highlighted the synergies and co-benefits of lock-step improvements in atmospheric modeling — that often culminates in accurate forecasting, and optimal design and deployment of monitoring instrumentation. The completed special issue should be available in both printed and electronic forms shortly.

FRD
Dennis Finn is nearing completion of a draft journal manuscript entitled “An Analysis of Wind Direction Changes in the Very Stable Boundary Layer,” with Rick Eckman, Bruce Hicks, and collaborators at Washington State University as coauthors. The manuscript uses data from Project Sagebrush Phase 2 to investigate abrupt shifts in wind direction that periodically occur in the very stable boundary layer. These shifts make the modeling of plumes much more challenging in such conditions, because the plumes tend to be significantly wider than would be expected based solely on standard turbulence observations.

FRD is wrapping up some data processing and archiving for the Wind Forecast Improvement Project 2 (WFIP2) that was not completed by Matt Brewer prior to his departure last May. Some of the project data files had been incorrectly uploaded to the WFIP2 archive using a text transfer mode that corrupted the binary file contents. This has been corrected. Additional flux data sets that were omitted last year are also being uploaded to the archive.

ATDD
Monique Baskin, Climate Portfolio Policy Advisor in the Office of Policy, Planning and Evaluation (PPE), visited ATDD on 1 March to learn more about the division’s climate research and development activities. Bruce Baker provided an overview, and additional presentations were made by Mark Hall, Tilden Meyers, John Kochendorfer, Tim Wilson, and Praveena Krishnan. Ms. Baskin also toured ATDD’s site at Chestnut Ridge and the U.S. Climate Reference Network site at ATDD.

On 26 February, Temple Lee gave a presentation at the NOAA senior management meeting. In his talk, entitled “New Techniques for Observing Boundary Layer Processes: Examples from Recent Field Campaigns,” he highlighted examples of how he is using observations from small unmanned aircraft systems in his research, as well as their potential benefit to enhancing scientific understanding of land-atmosphere interactions.