Dr. Howard Diamond, as the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) Program Manager, was invited to dial in to the March 2020 monthly meeting of the North Slope Borough Assembly (analogous to a city or county council) meeting. The North Slope Borough is the northernmost municipal government in the U.S. and encompasses an area of nearly 95,000 square miles across northern Alaska. The USCRN program is working to install a station in Kaktovik, which is in the northeastern portion of Alaska and adjacent to the coast of the Beaufort Sea. The Council meeting agenda included an initial hearing for an ordinance authorizing a lease between the North Slope Borough and NOAA concerning the installation and operation of a USCRN station in Kaktovik The ordinance was approved at this initial hearing and will now proceed to a final hearing that Dr. Diamond has been invited to dial into as well on April 7th, when the ordinance will be on the Assembly’s public hearing portion of the agenda; should it be approved at that time, it will then be signed and approved, and then NOAA can proceed with getting a formal and signed site license agreement with the North Slope Borough to install and operate a USCRN station in Kaktovik.

Xinrong Ren remotely gave a presentation titled “Aircraft Observations in Summer 2019 during LISTOS2019” to the NESCAUM (Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management) Monitoring and Assessment Committee Meeting on March 4. The talk focused on spatial distribution of ozone and its precursors over New York City and Long Island Sound area during two ozone events in summer 2019.

Xinrong Ren attended the University of Maryland – Maryland Department of Environment Quarterly meeting in Baltimore, MD on March 5. At the meeting, scientists shared recent results on air quality observations and modeling in Maryland. Xinrong gave a presentation titled “Emission Evaluation Using Observations from Winter 2020 Flights” during the meeting.

A paper titled “Long-Term Observations of Atmospheric Speciated Mercury at a Coastal Site in the Northern Gulf of Mexico during 2007–2018” was recently published in Atmosphere. The paper summarizes the mercury observation results at the Grand Bay site in Moss Point, Mississippi over the 12-year period. ARL co-authors include Xinrong Ren, Winston Luke, Paul Kelley, Mark Cohen, and Ariel Stein. Citation: Ren, X., W. T. Luke, P. Kelley, M. D. Cohen, M. L. Olson, J. Walker, R. Cole, M. Archer, R. Artz, and A. Stein, Long-term observations of atmospheric speciated mercury at a coastal site in the northern Gulf of Mexico during 2007–2018, Atmosphere, 11, 268, doi:10.3390/atmos11030268, 2020. Abstract: Atmospheric mercury species [gaseous elemental mercury (GEM), gaseous oxidized mercury (GOM), and particulate-bound mercury (PBM)], trace pollutants (O3, SO2, CO, NO, NOY, and black carbon), and meteorological parameters have been continuously measured since 2007 at an Atmospheric Mercury Network (AMNet) site that is located on the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico in Moss Point, MS. For the data that were collected between 2007 and 2018, the average concentrations and standard deviations are 1.39 ± 0.22 ng m−3 for GEM, 5.1 ± 10.2 pg m−3 for GOM, 5.9 ± 13.0 pg m−3 for PBM, and 309 ± 407 ng m−2 wk−1 for mercury wet deposition, with interannual trends of −0.009 ng m−3 yr−1 for GEM, −0.36 pg m−3 yr−1 for GOM, 0.18 pg m−3 yr−1 for PBM, and 2.8 ng m−2 wk−1 yr−1 for mercury wet deposition. The diurnal variation of GEM shows lower concentrations in the early morning due to GEM depletion, likely due to plant uptake in high humidity events and slight elevation during the day, likely due to downward mixing to the surface of higher concentrations of GEM in the air aloft. The seasonal variation of GEM shows higher levels in winter and spring and lower levels in summer and fall. Diurnal variations of both GOM and PBM show broad peaks in the afternoon likely due to the photochemical oxidation of GEM. Seasonally, PBM measurements exhibit higher levels in winter and early spring and lower levels in summer with rising levels in fall, while GOM measurements show high levels in late spring / early summer and late fall and low levels in winter. The seasonal variation of mercury wet deposition shows higher values in summer and lower values in winter, due to larger rainfall amounts in summer than in winter. As expected, anticorrelation between mercury wet deposition and the sum of GOM and PBM, but positive correlation between mercury wet deposition and rainfall were observed. Correlation among GOM, ozone, and SO2 suggests possible different GOM sources: direct emissions and photochemical oxidation of GEM, with the possible influence of boundary layer dynamics and seasonal variability. This study indicates that the monitoring site experiences are impacted from local and regional mercury sources as well as large scale mercury cycling phenomena.

“Wintertime CO2, CH4 and CO emissions estimation for the Washington DC/ Baltimore metropolitan area using an inverse modeling technique” was published in Environmental Science and Technology. Two ARL scientists, Drs. Xinrong Ren and Ariel Stein, are among the authors of this new paper that utilizes an inverse model to estimate emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and carbon monoxide from the Washington-Baltimore area using the aircraft observations conducted in February 2016. Citation: Lopez-Coto, I., Ren, X., Salmon, O. E., Karion, A., Shepson, P. B., Dickerson, R. R., Stein, A., Prasad, K., and Whetstone, J. R., Wintertime CO2, CH4 and CO emissions estimation for the Washington DC/ Baltimore metropolitan area using an inverse modeling technique. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2020, 54, 5, 2606-2614, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.9b06619

A paper titled “Evaluating Time Domain Reflectometry and Coaxial Impedance Sensors for Soil Observations by the U.S. Climate Reference Network” by Tim Wilson, Howard Diamond, John Kochendorfer, Tilden Meyers, Mark Hall, Nancy Casey, Bruce Baker, Ronald Leeper, and Mike Polecki has been published in the Vadose Zone Journal. Citation: Wilson, T. B., Diamond, H. J., Kochendorfer, J., Meyers, T. P., Hall, M., Casey, N. W., Baker, C. B., Leeper, R., and Palecki, M. A.. Evaluating time domain reflectometry and coaxial impedance sensors for soil observations by the U.S. Climate Reference Network. Vadose Zone J. 2020; 19:e20013. https://doi.org/10.1002/vzj2.20013.

Temple Lee and Michael Buban were listed as co-authors on the article “The GEWEX Land-Atmosphere Feedback Observatory (GLAFO)” that appeared in the GEWEX Quarterly. The article describes the proposed GLAFO experiment, which builds upon work from the Land Atmosphere Feedback Experiment (LAFE) conducted in August 2017 in northern Oklahoma and involved scientists and engineers from about a half dozen NOAA labs and universities. The article also highlighted Temple and Michael’s work developing new surface-layer parameterizations using the LAFE datasets. Citation: Wulfmeyer, V., F. Späth, A. Behrendt, L. Jach, K. Warrach-Sagi, M. Ek, D. D. Turner, C. Senff, C. R. Ferguson, J. Santanello, T. R. Lee, Michael Buban, and A. Verhoef, 2020: The GEWEX Land-Atmosphere Feedback Observatory (GLAFO). GEWEX Quarterly 30, 1, 6-11.

A paper co-authored by Fong Ngan, “Sub Seasonal Variability of Elevated Dust Events over South Florida,” was accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2019JD031874