Two ARL Staff Serve as Special Issue Editors for Atmosphere

April 2018
Dr. Pius Lee and Dr. Rick Saylor served as invited Guest Editors for a recently-published special issue of Atmosphere titled, “Air Quality Monitoring and Forecasting,” along with Jeff McQueen of the National Weather Service’s Environmental Modeling Center.

The issue begins with an editorial by the three Guest Editors highlighting the synergies and co-benefits of lock-step improvements in atmospheric modeling; citing the frequent culmination of accurate forecasting and optimal design and deployment of monitoring instrumentation. The 12 papers that follow represent a dual focus on monitoring and forecasting measurements. These papers were chosen from a pool of applicants by a small panel of anonymous reviewers, themselves selected by the journal’s editor. One of the selected papers is “Overview of the Model and Observation Evaluation Toolkit (MONET) Version 1.0 for Evaluating Atmospheric Transport Models,” by ARL’s Barry Baker and Li Pan. In all, the papers represent efforts by nine universities, seven U.S. agencies, and five different countries.

Drs. Lee and Saylor, who support ARL headquarters and its Atmospheric Turbulence and Diffusion Division, respectively, worked on developing the issue for over a year. The topic was provided to them, then they refined the title and wrote a solicitation on the website which, in turn, was promoted by various well-known scientists and managers at various industry-wide meetings and events. Approximately nine months lapsed between the manuscript submission deadline and the ultimate publication date, a faster-than- normal turnaround for this type of publication.

Atmosphere is a well-known international, open access journal providing monthly access to scientific studies related to the atmosphere. Air quality is one of five sections within this journal. The remaining sections include atmospheric chemistry, atmospheric physics, air quality – climate interactions, and meteorology.

Dr. Lee attributes the editors’ selection for the special issue of Atmosphere to visibility gained following the 7th International Workshop on Air Quality Forecasting Research (IWAQFR), an event hosted by ARL at the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction in 2015. Dr. Lee affirmed that the guest editorship was a positive experience, highlighted by teamwork between ARL and EMC.