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The Joint ARM User Facility/Atmospheric System Research (ASR) Principal Investigators Meeting will take place June 10 to 13, 2019, at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center in Rockville, Maryland. ASR will provide more information soon.

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In early June, 2018, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) announced a new class of Laboratory Fellows, an honor bestowed on researchers credited with careers of sustained, high-quality work in science and engineering. One of those so honored was Jerome Fast, a 24-year atmospheric scientist at PNNL and a veteran of research projects supported by the Atmospheric [...]

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The biggest challenges in science require supercomputers of unprecedented capability. That’s why the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) recently launched Summit, a system that will provide scientists with incredible computing power. With a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second—or 200 petaflops, Summit will be eight times more powerful than ORNL’s [...]

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The DOE-Climate Program Office (CPO) Fiscal Year 2019 Federal Funding Opportunity (FFO) announcement has just been published and is accessible via the CPO website. The FFO announcement anticipates support of up to two Climate Process Teams. DOE’s Model development and analysis areas will contribute to this. The application deadlines are: Letters of Intent due by 5 [...]

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Each year, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) opens annual funding opportunities to support fundamental research and scientific user facilities to deliver the scientific discoveries and major scientific tools that transform understanding of nature and advances the energy, economic, and national security of the United States. The Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program, within DOE’s Office of [...]

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In late June, 84 scientists around the country received Early Career Research Program awards from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The 54 awardees from universities will receive at least $150,000 a year for five years to further their research. The 30 recipients from national labs will receive at least $500,000 annually. Four of the young [...]

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The Climate and Environmental Sciences Division (CESD), which is within the Office of Biological and Environmental Research of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, published its five-year strategic plan for 2018 to 2023. The plan describes five scientific grand challenge research questions that CESD will work to address through its programs, projects, and user [...]

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The Earth was apparently losing water. Ruby Leung, a scientist from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and her team were baffled by their results. “We were seeing the sea level decreasing at an alarming rate,” she said. Fortunately, they were only looking at a virtual Earth. They quickly realized there were [...]

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In Science, newly documented findings on rapid erosion over large areas of subtropical marine low cloud cover, with pronounced implications for climate A new paper in the July 19 issue of Science reports novel findings with implications for the Earth’s radiation budget. It documents abrupt erosion of the low marine cloud cover that cools and blankets [...]

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A Boston College-Aerodyne Research, Inc. group investigates soot particles in a laboratory setting For as long as clouds have hugged the Earth and hovered above it, solid or liquid particles from land and sea have made their way into the air, combined in suspension with atmospheric gases, and dispersed as aerosols. The particles can be from vegetation, [...]

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Sessions for the 2018 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting are being announced. If you will be leading a session relevant to the Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program or Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility, please let us know. We are collecting this information to be shared on the ASR and ARM websites as they are provided. The following sessions [...]

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Sessions for the 2019 American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting are being announced. If you will be leading a session relevant to the Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program or Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility, please let us know. We are collecting this information to be shared on the ASR and ARM websites as they are provided. Abstracts can [...]

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An ASR science team is ‘poised to reinvent our sense of stratocumulus clouds’ Mark Miller is a Rutgers University professor of meteorology who studies the atmosphere’s boundary layer, the turbulent first kilometer of the atmosphere where most weather happens. In 1989, he was a student at Pennsylvania State University when he traveled to the Azores with his [...]

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Graham Feingold and other theoreticians use the new tool to test model parameterizations To some of us, “lasso” refers to a stiff loop of rope handy for throwing. To statisticians, it is a way of doing regression analysis. For atmospheric scientists who develop and test models, however, LASSO is a new way to throw a noose around [...]

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Abstracts are now being accepted for a session on the Layered Atlantic Smoke Interactions with Clouds (LASIC) field campaign at the American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting in January 2019 in Phoenix, Arizona. The session—a part of the 11th Symposium on Aerosol-Cloud-Climate Interactions—will center on the recent U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility [...]

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After a long and varied science career, ASR Program Manager Ashley Williamson is poised to move on North of Columbus, Georgia, the hill country of the Piedmont plateau slopes southward into flat coastal terrain along the Chattahoochee River. Not far away are a series of deep chasms known as the state’s “Little Grand Canyon.” It’s pretty country, [...]

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For nearly a decade, one lab project has dug into the details of the hard-to-predict boundary layer We all experience weather—the rain, wind, and sliding temperatures that color our daily lives. Our weather happens in the boundary layer, the lowest few kilometers of Earth’s atmosphere. Since 2009, the boundary layer and its clouds, precipitation, and patterns of [...]

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Set of papers investigates temperature differences between models and observations A new group of four papers published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres explores why earth system models simulate warmer surface temperatures than ground-based observations show in the central United States. The papers, led by authors from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the U.K. Met Office, focus on results [...]

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ASR scientists will gather data on Madden-Julian Oscillation events Oregon storms and Sri Lankan cyclones bear a common signature—a cyclical churning of clouds and rain the size of Alaska called the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO). This slow-moving weather pattern travels from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific every 30 to 60 days, but sometimes weakens over an [...]

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Particles causing atmospheric changes are common in mid-Atlantic boundary layer Southern Africa is among the world's largest emitters of biomass-burning aerosols (tiny particles in the air). Their westward transport over the remote southeast Atlantic Ocean colocates some of the largest atmospheric loadings of absorbing aerosols with the least examined of the Earth’s major subtropical stratocumulus decks. Now, [...]

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A diverse team of atmospheric scientists goes to work in an evolving Arctic Last spring, University of Colorado, Boulder research scientist Jessie Creamean spent a few weeks in frigid and windy Oliktok Point, Alaska. Within sight of the ice-bound Beaufort Sea and North Slope oil rigs and refineries, she set up an aerosol sampling system for [...]

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has unveiled a powerful, new earth system model that uses the world’s fastest computers so that scientists can better understand how earth system processes interact today and how they may evolve in the future. After four years of development, the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) was recently released to [...]

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Since childhood, Jiwen Fan looked to the skies for inspiration As a girl in a farming village in Hunan Province, China, Jiwen Fan—now a fast-rising atmospheric scientist—grew up in a household with earthen floors and no electricity. She was the eldest of four children in a family of rice farmers and started working in the fields [...]

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