ARL Weekly News – August 5, 2024

Community Engagement

Nebila Lichiheb participated virtually in the annual AGU Global Engagement Committee meeting on 29-30 July. The meeting was hosted in Merida, Mexico where they discussed the important goals of the AGU strategic plan and how to create engagement with local and international geoscience communities.

HYSPLIT helps emergency manager with hazardous materials fire

The Weather Forecasting Office La Crosse provided a NWS-HYSPLIT run for the Juneau County, Wisconsin Emergency Manager on Monday, August 5, by request. A semi truck carrying lead-based batteries caught on fire on Interstate 94 near Camp Douglas, WI. This fire went on for about two hours before it was brought under control, the HYSPLIT model was used to show the trajectory of the hazardous materials smoke plume in order to protect emergency services personnel and the surrounding communities. The Air Resources Laboratory develops, updates, and maintains HYSPLIT, which is one of the most extensively used atmospheric transport and dispersion models in the atmospheric sciences community. The NWS-HYSPLIT model was developed specifically for the National Weather Service by the Air Resources Laboratory and has more features than the publicly available version.