ARL Weekly News – November 22, 2019

ASMD
On November 20, 2019, several people from ASMD, including Ariel Stein, Mark Cohen, Winston Luke, Xinrong Ren and Allison Ring, had a meeting with Colm Sweeny from NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory and Anna Karion and Israel Lopez-Coto from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The meeting was held at NOAA’s Center for Weather and Climate Prediction in College Park, MD, and focused on a coordinated aircraft study in fall 2020 to characterize boundary meteorology as well as emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants from urban areas and large point sources. Possible aircraft options, instrumentation and flight plans as well as scientific objectives were discussed.

ATDD
Dr. Rick Saylor participated in the NOAA Climate Program Office’s (CPO) Earth System Science and Modeling (ESSM) workshop from November 18-19, 2019, in Silver Spring, MD. Dr. Saylor presented a lightning talk entitled “Potential Impacts of Extreme Heat on Air Quality Forecasting,” which outlined recent work in ARL focused on windblown dust and smoke from wildfires in support of NOAA air quality forecasting. As the climate continues to warm, air pollution episodes triggered by wildfires or windblown dust may become more frequent and widespread. ARL is performing research to improve emission estimates of pollutants from these two intermittent sources that are likely to become vastly more important for accurate air quality forecasting under extreme heat climate scenarios. Dr. Saylor also attended the CPO Climate Connections meeting on November 20-21 in Silver Spring and presented a poster by Bruce Baker, John Kochendorfer, Tilden Myers and Howard Diamond entitled “Climate Observing System: Where are we and where do we need to be in the future?” The poster highlighted the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), especially the USCRN in Alaska, and the Surface Energy Balance Network as examples of high quality climate observations that are critical for long-term monitoring and enhanced understanding of changes to the climate system.