ARL Weekly News – March 9, 2018

HQ
Xinrong Ren, Paul Kelley, and Winston Luke traveled to Essex, Maryland to assess a site on Hart-Miller Island at which ARL will install a variety of trace gas sensors for air chemistry, mercury, and greenhouse gases as part of the upcoming Ozone Water-Land Environmental Transition Study 2 (OWLETS-2), a NASA study examining the roles played by chemistry and meteorology in controlling levels of photochemical ozone pollution around the Northern Chesapeake Bay. Hart-Miller Island is located at the mouths of Back River and Middle River, where they empty into the Chesapeake Bay east of the City of Baltimore. Scientists from a number of federal and state agencies and universities will also participate in the campaign, conducted at fixed and mobile sites around the Baltimore metropolitan area later this summer. ARL’s participation is being sponsored in part by a grant from the Maryland Department of the Environment to the University of Maryland’s Department of Atmospheric and Ocean Science, part of the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites (CICS).

ATDD
A manuscript “Significant permafrost nitrous oxide emissions observed on a regional scale, ” by authors Jordan Wilkerson, Ronald Dobosy, David S. Sayres, Claire Healy, Edward Dumas, Bruce Baker, and James G. Anderson has been submitted for consideration by the journal Nature. The chief findings are based on airborne eddy-covariance measurements from the FOCAL (Flux Observations of Carbon from an Airborne Laboratory) expedition in 2013. The aircraft flew within 50 m of the ground with a combined footprint area of 310 km² spread in flight tracks over a region 50 km NS by 100 km EW on Alaska’s North Slope in late August 2013. Over this region we found the mean N₂O emission from the land surface to be 1) significantly positive (based on uncertainty analysis), 2) comparable to studies in laboratories and in highly localized in-situ measurements, and 3) far higher than generally assumed for the Arctic region in global N₂O emission assessments. We understand this to be the first reported spatially extensive coverage of N₂O flux in the Arctic. Publication in Nature is a long shot, but there are many good options remaining if they decline.

FRD
The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has accepted a proposal for an overview paper describing observations collected during the Wind Forecast Improvement Project 2 (WFIP2) in Oregon and Washington. Jim Wilczak from the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) will be lead author, with coauthors from the organizations participating in the study, including Rick Eckman from FRD. The paper outline has a section set aside for a discussion of the surface energy balance observations collected by FRD.

Sudheer Bhimireddy, a Ph.D. candidate working with Dr. Kiran Bhaganagar at the University of Texas San Antonio, is starting a project to perform Large Eddy Simulations (LES) of tracer releases conducted during Project Sagebrush. They are part of the university’s Laboratory of Turbulence, Sensing, & Intelligence Systems, which focuses on high resolution observations and modeling in turbulent flows. The work will start with the daytime releases in Project Sagebrush Phase 1, since unstable and near-neutral conditions are easier to deal with using LES.