ARL Weekly News – October 13, 2017

HQ

ARL is contributing to the development of the National Weather Service (NWS) Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) in the disciplines of modeling the suspended particulate matter (aerosol) chemical composition influential for convection and cloud micro-physics. The project is called NGGPS-aerosol. ARL, being the leader in providing emission to the National Air Quality Forecasting Capability (NAQFC), leverages its expertise in chemical emission regional modeling to the global scenario in NGGPS. Pius Lee and Daniel Tong reported ARL’s achievement in handling the NGGPS global grid in 50 km horizontal resolution for grid remapping over the Conterminous U.S. for blending a part of the emission inventory in NAQFC to NGGPS. This report marks the half-point mark of the fast turn-around one year NGGPS-aerosol project. The report was well received by the NWS NGGPS program managers.

FRD

For many years, a subset of the stations in the NOAA/INL Mesonet has been included in the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation’s (USBR) AgriMet cooperative network, which is used to estimate crop water use for agricultural applications. FRD recently received a request from the USBR to add soil temperature measurements at the Kettle Butte Mesonet station. The USBR would pay for the instruments, whereas FRD would incorporate the new soil data into the Mesonet database and service the instruments during normal semiannual visits to all the stations. A similar set of Agrimet soil sensors is already present at another station. The additional sensors are of benefit to both NOAA and USBR.