ARL scientists busy at the 2026 American Meteorological Society annual meeting

February 11, 2026

In addition to their very successful presentations, ARL scientists chaired sessions and took advantage of opportunities to meet with collaborators they typically don’t have the chance to meet in person during the American Meteorological Society (AMS) annual meeting at the end of January.

Temple Lee and John Kochendorfer each chaired or co-chaired five sessions. John also met with many NOAA and academic researchers and attended the AMS Committee on Measurements annual in-person meeting as a serving member of the Scientific and Technological Activities Commission. HyunCheol Kim took advantage of the opportunity to meet with several scientists in person to discuss future collaborations on wildfire modeling. Fantine Ngan and Praveena Krishnan, who work in different locations, were excited to meet in-person to talk about their work on urban boundary layers and discuss current and potential collaborations with external partners. Fantine also spent time connecting with past and potential interns, she said “it was wonderful to finally meet in person as [2020 William Lapenta intern, Leah Hopson’s] internship was entirely remote.” 

Two women taking a selfie together inside a large conference center.

Bavand Sadeghi delivered an oral presentation of his work using a tracer of opportunity approach with the HYSPLIT model to better quantify uncertainties and errors in urban-scale dispersion modeling. He found the discussion and questions around source-receptor selection and urban complexity to be highly relevant and helpful and will inform the next steps of the project.

HyunCheol Kim gave an invited talk in the Boundary-Layer Processes, Atmospheric Dispersion, and Inverse Modeling session. He presented the HYSPLIT-based emissions inverse modeling system and its applications to wildfire, volcanic eruption and nuclear incident source-term estimation.

Tianfeng Chai’s successful presentation was titled “Investigation of plume rise in wildfire smoke dispersion simulations” as part of the 24th Joint Conference on the Applications of Air Pollution Meteorology with the A&WMA.

Temple Lee delivered a presentation titled “Clear night turbulence characteristics above a deciduous forest in complex terrain revealed by a wind lidar” and was co-author on three more presentations at AMS.

Man standing on a stage in the front of a large conference room. A large screen showing a power point presentation appears on the right and there are people scattered in the audience.
Temple Lee presenting his work at the 2026 AMS annual meeting. Credit: Sasha Ivans (LI-COR)
Woman standing behind a podium, two men sit at a table to her left, one hidden behind a monitor.
Praveena Krishnan giving her talk during a session where John Kochendofer (far right) was a chair. Credit: Temple Lee (NOAA)

Other ARL scientists presentations included:

Fantine Ngan: “Assessing turbulence uncertainty in urban dispersion modeling using rooftop observations”

Irena Ivanova: “Beyond the big-leaf approximation in the Unified Forecast System-Air Quality Model: sub-canopy impacts on weather and boundary layer ozone predictions”

Praveena Krishan: “Assessing heatwave impacts on urban boundary-layer dynamics using UrbanNet tower and doppler lidar observations in the Washington D.C. metro area”