ARL Weekly News – January 27, 2023

Conferences and Events

WMO Greenhouse Gas Monitoring Symposium

Chris Loughner will attend the WMO International Greenhouse Gas Monitoring Symposium January 30-February 1, where he will present a talk titled “Development of a prototype operational greenhouse gas emissions estimation system.” He will also be attending the IG3IS Stakeholder consultation and user summit February 2-3, where he will present a poster titled “Building a spatially scalable prototype operational greenhouse gas emissions estimation system.”

Publications

Published: Decadal Application of WRF/Chem under Future Climate and Emission Scenarios: Impacts of Technology-Driven Climate and Emission Changes on Regional Meteorology and Air Quality.

Dr. Patrick Campbell of NOAA-ARL/ASMD and GMU/CISESS was co-author on the recent publication “Decadal Application of WRF/Chem under Future Climate and Emission Scenarios: Impacts of Technology-Driven Climate and Emission Changes on Regional Meteorology and Air Quality.” This work presents new climate and emissions scenarios to investigate changes on future meteorology and air quality in the U.S. Here, we employ a dynamically downscaled Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with chemistry (WRF/Chem) simulations that use two Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios (i.e., A1B and B2) integrated with explicitly projected emissions from a novel Technology Driver Model (TDM).

Highlights: The projected 2046–2055 emissions show widespread reductions in most gas and aerosol species under both TDM/A1B and TDM/B2 scenarios over the U.S. Results further show that the combined effects of climate, greenhouse gas, and emissions changes lead to a significantly lower number of future (2046-2055) ozone exceedance days (i.e., maximum daily average 8-h; MDA8h ozone > 70 ppb), with grid cell maximum of up to 43 days (domain average ~0.5 days) and 62 days (domain average ~2 days) for the TDM/A1B and TDM/B2 scenarios, respectively. However, in the western U.S., larger ozone increases lead to increases in some nonattainment areas, especially for the TDM/A1B scenario. Furthermore, the number of future fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exceedance days (i.e., daily 24-h average; DA24hr PM2.5 > 35 µg m−3) is significantly reduced over the eastern U.S. under both TDM/A1B and B2 scenarios, which suggests that both climate and emission changes may synergistically lead to decreases in PM2.5 nonattainment areas in the future.

Implications: The results from this work add possible future scenarios (i.e., TDM/A1B and TDM/B2) and show important differences in the changes of near-surface ozone and PM2.5 across the U.S. compared with the IPCC-only (i.e., A1B and B2) and other Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios. Thus, the results here are useful in further supporting the policy and regulatory analysis and assessment of the impacts of future control and changes in emissions on U.S. air quality in the face of imminent climate and emission changes.

Source: The work is published in the journal of Atmosphere, under the Special Issue: Improving Air Quality Predictions and Assessment Across Scales. The special issue is still accepting new paper submissions, and the deadline is May 20, 2023.

Reference: Jena, C.; Zhang, Y.; Wang, K.; Campbell, P.C. Decadal Application of WRF/Chem under Future Climate and Emission Scenarios: Impacts of Technology-Driven Climate and Emission Changes on Regional Meteorology and Air Quality. Atmosphere 2023, 14, 225. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos14020225.

Published: A field evaluation of the SoilVUE10 soil moisture sensor

Wilson, T. B, Kochendorfer, J., Diamond, H. J., Meyers, T. P., Hall, M., French, B., Myles, L., & Saylor, R. D. (2022). A field evaluation of the SoilVUE10 soil moisture sensor. Vadose Zone Journal, 00, e220241. https://doi.org/10.1002/vzj2.20241

Abstract: The U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) has been engaged in ground-based soil water and soil temperature observations since 2009. As a nationwide climate network, the network stations are distributed across vast complex terrains. Due to the expansive distribution of the network and the related variability in soil properties, obtaining site-specific calibrations for sensors is a significant and costly endeavor. Presented here are three commercial-grade electromagnetic sensors, with built-in thermistors to measure both soil water and soil temperature, including the SoilVUE10 Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) probe (hereafter called SP) (Campbell Scientific, Inc.), 50 MHz coaxial impedance dielectric sensor (model HydraProbe, Stevens Water Monitoring Systems, Inc.) (hereafter called HP), and the TDR-315L Probe (model TDR-315L, Acclima, Inc.) (hereafter called AP), which were evaluated in a relatively nonconductive loam soil in Oak Ridge, TN, from 2021 to 2022. The HP manufacturer-supplied calibration equation for loam soils was used in this study. While volumetric water content data from HP and AP were 82–99% of respective gravimetric observations at 10 cm, data from SP were only 65–81% of respective gravimetric observations in the top 20-cm soil horizon, where soil water showed relatively large spatial variability. The poor performance of the SP is likely due to poor contact between SP sensor electrodes and soil and the presence of soil voids caused by the installation method used, which itself may have caused soil disturbance.