Air Resources Laboratory at AGU Fall Meeting

December 1, 2020

Margaret Simon

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting will be held December 1-17, 2020. Originally planned for San Francisco, but virtual for 2020, AGU is the largest professional Earth and Space Science meeting, and the format for 2020 is distributed over a thousand hours of virtual content to maximize global engagement. NOAA’s Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) and NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), share results and expertise with the worldwide geophysical sciences community to support OAR’s strategy to strengthen internal and external collaboration.

ARL and other NOAA labs, The University of Maryland, the MD Dept. of Environment, and NIST among others, delve into the effects of the rapid, unplanned change in US economic activity and associated emissions of major air pollutants and greenhouse gases worldwide due to the pandemic. Session A048, Air Quality During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Responses to Emissions Reductions and the Role of in Situ Data II, highlights a number of observational and model analysis of changes in atmospheric composition during the pandemic. Xinrong Ren, in Session A048:  Photochemistry in New York City – Long Island Sound: Results from Summer 2020 Aircraft Observations. Dr. Ren will cover the results of his aircraft observations of ozone, ozone precursors, and meteorological parameters were made over New York City – Long Island Sound (NYC-LIS) area during ozone exceedance events in summer 2020.

Intensive field experiments were conducted at NOAA/ATDD in Oak Ridge, TN from October 2015 to January 2016 to provide an assessment of the quality of in situ measurements of Land Surface Temperatures and the quantitative uncertainties in the ground-based measurements and methods.  Results are described by Praveena Krishnan in GC127-02– An Intercomparison of ground-based land surface temperature measurements.

Volcanic Hazards: From Monitoring to Impacts II – includes hazard modeling work from Allison Ring and several other ARL researchers: Session V030-07: Exploring Volcanic Ash Forecasting Techniques Using HYSPLIT and VOLCAT Observations. They present work on developing probabilistic and quantitative ash products that will meet the impending ICAO forecasting requirements for volcanic ash. The authors are creating a computationally efficient modeling framework that uses a combination of HYSPLIT model output and VOLcanic Cloud Analysis Toolkit (VOLCAT) satellite observations to provide Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers (VAACs) with improved tools to generate the best available volcanic ash forecasts.

ARL led posters at AGU include:

• Tianfeng Chai – A176-0007 – Estimating biomass burning emissions with HYSPLIT-based emission inverse modeling system and GOES Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) observations
• Alice Crawford – A061-0002 – Off the Grid: The use of Gaussian mixture models with Lagrangian transport and dispersion models for density estimation and feature identification.
• Hyun C Kim A066-0005– Quantitative assessment of surface particulate matter concentrations change over China during the COVID-19 pandemic and its implication to Chinese economic activities
• Nebila Lichiheb – B097-0004 – On surface fluxes at night – Application of the virtual chamber approach to ammonia flux measurements above a corn canopy in central Illinois
• Fong Ngan – A065-0003 – Dispersion Model Evaluation using the 1996 Model Validation Program Tracer Study
• ARL Summer Student Eric Roy: V028-0016 – A Comparison of Meteorological Deterministic and Ensemble Inputs to HYSPLIT For Volcanic Ash Transport in Small to Moderate Sized Eruptions
• Binyu Wang of NCEP, along with ARL’s Barbara Stunder, Alice Crawford and Allison Ring: A114-0007–Development and Evaluation of a Volcanic Ash Ensemble Forecasting System using the NOAA HYSPLIT model