ARL Weekly News – August 10, 2018

HQ
From August 6-10, 2018, Xinrong Ren attended the 10th International Conference on Urban Climate/14th Symposium on the Urban Environment held at the City College of New York. He gave a talk titled, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions from New York City Based on Airborne Mass Balance Experiments” and presented some results on aircraft observations from the recent Long Island Sound Tropospheric Ozone Study. During the conference, he met with some colleagues from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Harvard University, and Stony Brook University and discussed possible collaboration on several research projects.

FRD
Rick Eckman gave a presentation to management at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) regarding the risks associated with tornadoes and other high-wind events. The presentation was requested as a result of the severe weather that has occurred in the region this year, including an EF1 tornado that touched down at the INL on 31 May. The INL has made assumptions about design-basis winds for their facilities and were concerned that those assumptions may need to be reevaluated. Although this has been an active year for strong thunderstorms, it has not been so active to be far outside the range of variability experienced in past years.

ATDD
Upper Missouri River Basin Monitoring Network Meeting: ATDD’s Howard Diamond, in his role as the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) Program Manager, will be attending a meeting in Sioux Falls, South Dakota from August 14-15 dealing with re-evaluating and updating a 2013 Upper Missouri River Basin Monitoring recommendation for soil moisture and Great Plains plains snow monitoring. The USCRN has a total of 17 stations in the upper Missouri River basin, and the meeting will bring together a number of federal, state, and local agencies that will endeavor to: (1) identify current technology/equipment for soil moisture and Great Plains snow monitoring; (2) consider station densities across the upper Missouri River basin; (3) determine general stations locations and determine if established stations can be modified; (4) discuss participating agency capacities and expertise; (5) develop cost estimates for the potential purchase, installation and ongoing maintenance of stations; and (6) discuss potential for federal, state and/or extension offices maintaining/owning stations. While the USCRN has a significant presence in the basin, it is also a national network vice a regional one, and so the USCRN contribution to this effort will rely more on offering existing precipitation and soil moisture observing capabilities, as well as offering our engineering and testing expertise, vice making any long-term modifications to our USCRN station configuration in the basin.