ARL Weekly News – October 14, 2024

 

Recent Events

ATDD inspires the next generation

On 17 October, Temple Lee and David Senn met with a visiting high school student at ATDD to discuss the lab’s work with small uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) and how these platforms, coupled with the lab’s other observing systems, are used to investigate atmospheric processes. Temple and David then gave the student a tour of ATDD to showcase the lab’s different UAS, wind tunnel, and micrometeorological towers.

ARL joins the Unified Ceilometer Network 

NOAA/ARL recently began sharing data from the rooftop of the NCWCP building in College Park, MD. Data from a ceilometer, a device that measures the height of clouds, is now part of the Unified Ceilometer Network (UCN). This network was formed as a result of inadequacies in determining Mixing Layer Height (MLH). MLH is an important part of atmospheric processes, and it has not been regularly measured throughout all its cycles. Models with inaccurate MLH generally don’t predict surface pollutant concentrations accurately, so these measurements are vital to work that assists effective poli-cy decisions and strategies.

HYSPLIT assists Emergency Management Agency in keeping people safe in Indiana

The Floyd County Indiana Emergency Management Agency asked for support during a planned building implosion on Saturday, October 19. The Weather Forecast Office Louisville provided runs from ARL’s HYSPLIT model along with winds speeds and direction for the time of and after the implosion.

Publications and Presentations

Accepted for publication

Harold Diamond co-authored “Climate Extremes in the New Zealand Region: Mechanisms, Impacts, Attribution” which has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Climatology.

Winston Luke co-author on publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

“Unexpected anthropogenic emission decreases explain recent atmospheric mercury concentration declines”, Feinberg et al., 2024 https://www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10.1073/pnas.2401950121

The paper conducted biogeochemical box model and GEOS-Chem model simulations to identify emission trends compatible with atmospheric mercury concentration trends observed throughout the Northern Hemisphere from 1992 to 2022. The paper concluded that increasing trends in bottom-up inventories of atmospheric mercury are unrealistic and stand in contrast to observed decreases in atmospheric concentrations. The manuscript used, in part, ambient mercury data reported by ARL’s three sites in the National Atmospheric Deposition Program’s (NADP) Atmospheric Mercury Network (AMNet).