ARL Weekly News – May 7, 2021

Recent Events

Papers Accepted:

Bruce Baker is a Co-author on a paper that has been accepted by the Vadose Zone Journal  entitled: Developing a Strategy for the National Coordinated Soil Moisture Monitoring Network.

Soil moisture is a critical land surface variable, impacting a wide variety of climatological, agricultural, and hydrological processes. Determining the current soil moisture status is possible via a variety of methods, including in situ monitoring, remote sensing, and numerical modeling. While all of these approaches are rapidly evolving, there is no cohesive strategy or framework to integrate these diverse information sources to develop and disseminate coordinated national soil moisture products that will improve our ability to understand climate variability. The National Coordinated Soil Moisture Monitoring Network (NCSMMN) initiative has developed a national strategy for network coordination with NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS). NIDIS provides funding to NOAA’s Air Resources Laboratory and National Centers for Environmental Information for the development of  high-quality soil moisture measurements for the inclusion of ARL’s U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) into the NCSMMN. The USCRN is one of the national networks  The strategy is currently in review within NOAA, but work is underway to implement the initial milestones of the strategy. This update reviews the goals and steps being taken to establish this national scale coordination for soil moisture monitoring in the United States.

Patrick Campbell, Barry Baker and Rick Saylor authored: Harmonized Emissions Component (HEMCO) 3.0 as a versatile emissions component for atmospheric models: application in the GEOS-Chem, NASA GEOS, WRF-GC, CESM2, NOAA GEFS-Aerosol, and NOAA UFS models.  The Harmonized Emissions Component (HEMCO) is a software component for computing emissions from a user-selected ensemble of emission inventories and algorithms. While available in standalone mode, HEMCO also provides a general on-line facility for models to compute emissions at runtime. It allows users to re-grid, combine, overwrite, subset, and scale emissions from different inventories through a configuration file and with no change to the model source code.  Preprint in Geoscientific Model Development.: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2021-130

International Science and Engineering Festival

On 6 May, Temple Lee served as a judge for the International Science and Engineering Fair’s Earth and environmental sciences category.