NOAA Advisor visits with the Air Resources Laboratory

May 22, 2025

Last Friday, Bryton Shang, NOAA Senior Advisor, visited the NCWCP building where he spent his day getting to know the resident NOAA programs and people. His last stop that afternoon was with the Air Resources Laboratory (ARL).

There Bryton (L) got a crash course from ARL’s Director, Ariel Stein (R), on the fascinating history of the lab and an overview of current work conducted across all three ARL divisions.

Afterwards, Ariel took Bryton on a tour of the lab and instruments used by ARL’s Air Resources Car (ARC) to collect hyperlocal measurements. These same instruments are mounted in NOAA’s twin otter aircraft during field missions. 

Harold Diamond, ARL’s Atmospheric Sciences and Modeling Division Director, explained the instruments on the UrbanNet tower mounted on top of the NCWCP building. One sensor is the black globe thermometer that measures radiant temperature; which is important for calculating heat stress, one of the leading causes of weather-related deaths. This tower is one of five in the D.C. metro area. 

Fantine Ngan, Assistant Research Engineer, talked about her current work on assessing the HYSPLIT model’s ability to model smoke dispersion using data gathered from drones and weather balloons in Alaska during controlled oil burns. The results of this work help improve smoke forecasting for emergency response and public safety.

Physical Research Scientist Barry Baker discussed his work building models that forecast air quality and the computing time around doing this type of work. He is currently working on the next version of the Air Quality Model (AQM) featured here.

Ariel showed how instruments are mounted in the ARC mobile platform. Afterwards, Physical Scientist Xinrong Ren (not pictured) took Bryton on a ride along to see how the car works to measure hazardous airborne materials.

The last stop was with ARL’s Senior IT Manager, Rick Jiang, who highlighted the more than 15 scientific computing and storage servers ARL hosts. ARL consolidated IT systems across three divisions nationwide. This enabled efficient IT solutions and services supporting ARL research and operations, particularly its flagship product, the HYSPLIT/READY applications. HYSPLIT/READY serves thousands of researchers, government agencies, and registered users worldwide.

Photo Credits: Tracey Bien-Aimé, NOAA/ORAU