ARL Weekly News – November 30, 2018

HQ
Tiffany House was selected to receive an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO)/Diversity Individual Award at the upcoming OAR Awards Ceremony scheduled for December 5. This award is being given “For serving as an Ad Hoc member of the EEO Advisory Committee and adding value by offering ideas, opinions and recommendations. Additionally, for serving as the Nominations and Elections Chair for the Committee’s First Election of Executive Board Members.”

Tiffany House and Michelle Chawlk visited ATDD’s Oak Ridge, Tennessee office on November 26-27, 2018. House presented an ARL overview, then she and Chawlk answered questions posed by the ATDD staff before taking a tour of the facility.

Daniel Tong attended the US EPA STAR “PM in a Changing World” Workshop held in the Research Triangle Park, NC from November 28-29, 2018. He gave an invited talk titled “Rising dust and Valley fever infection in the western United States”.

ATDD
ATDD’s Dr. Howard Diamond represented the acting ARL Director, Dr. Ariel Stein, at a meeting in Silver Spring, Maryland on November 28, 2018. As part of a State Department program called the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), six air quality scientists from Spain visited NOAA for the express purpose of getting presentations on various air quality and related work. In addition to Dr. Diamond, there were also presentations from the National Weather Service/National Centers for Environmental Prediction’s Environmental Monitoring Center, OAR’s Office of Weather and Air Quality, and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service’s Center for Satellite Applications and Research. Dr. Diamond, the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) Program Manager and U.S. Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) National Coordinator, presented an overview of the wide range of ARL activities that focused on its various boundary layer activities ranging from mesonet and USCRN surface monitoring, to atmospheric surface exchange, vertical profiles and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, measures and models atmospheric transport, dispersion, chemistry, and surface exchange of a number of chemicals and aerosols, to HYSPLIT, tracers and dispersion, and modeling as it fits in to the National Air Quality Forecasting Capability. The talk went over very well, and the visitors from Spain got a good idea of the activities going on the various air quality science and monitoring work across NOAA.

Temple Lee and Michael Buban shared research results at a science workshop on the Land Atmosphere Feedback Experiment (LAFE), hosted by the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany from 6-8 Nov. At the workshop, Temple and Michael presented results in which they used the LAFE datasets, coupled with large eddy simulations, to develop and evaluate new similarity relationships. These will help lead to improvements in the surface layer schemes used in operational numerical weather prediction models.

From 29 Nov – 1 Dec, Temple Lee and Michael Buban are participating in an intensive observation period of the Meso 18-19 field experiment which is part of the VORTEX-SE program. The experiment, which started 1 Nov and runs through 30 Apr 2019, is focused on improving scientific understanding of severe weather genesis over the southeast US. To support this experiment, ATDD will be participating in intensive observation periods, in which they will launch weather balloons every 6 hours from one or more sites during the 48 hours prior to anticipated severe weather events.