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A onetime string theorist now improves the way models represent spectral radiances throughout the atmosphere
Physicist Eli Mlawer (rhymes with “flower”) is a principal scientist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER), a for-profit research company in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he develops algorithms that help modelers represent radiative transfer.
Several times since 2008, Mlawer’s work has been funded [...]
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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program is now accepting new applicants for supplemental funds to conduct part of their graduate thesis research at a DOE national laboratory/facility in collaboration with a DOE laboratory scientist.
These research opportunities are designed to advance graduate students’ doctoral theses/dissertations while providing access [...]
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A highly cited scientist is unraveling the puzzle of mixed-phase clouds and improving how aerosols are represented in earth system models
For good reasons, aerosols are difficult to understand. Unlike other trace gases, which can persist in the atmosphere for years or even centuries, the lifespans of aerosols are measured in days.
To complicate things even more, [...]
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Well known for her unique retrievals of cloud properties, a veteran scientist investigates the mystery of secondary ice production
Christine Chiu of Colorado State University investigates clouds. She calls them “complicated 3D objects that evolve fast.”
She studies clouds from below and on all sides with scanning cloud radars and from above with satellite data. Her research [...]
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Every year the American Meteorological Society (AMS) presents awards to members of the weather, water, and climate community during its annual meeting. Several scientists recently or currently funded by the Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program received honors during the January 2019 meeting in Phoenix, Arizona.
Christopher Bretherton, a professor of atmospheric sciences and applied mathematics at [...]
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Buoyed by a sense of adventure and a passion for clouds, a scientist enters his third decade investigating Earth’s fragile cold regions.
Officially, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Atmospheric System Research (ASR) program dates back to 2010. But because of funding cycles already underway back then through administrative predecessors, ASR has an archive of research [...]
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A new article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society draws on a wealth of data from a recent Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility field campaign to demonstrate how land use and soil properties influence temperature and humidity with unexpected strength.
ARM conducted the Holistic Interactions of Shallow Clouds, Aerosols and Land Ecosystems (HI-SCALE) [...]
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DE-FOA-0002034 – Atmospheric System Research (ASR)
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) ASR program is now accepting research grant applications for observational, data analysis, and/or modeling studies that use observations supported by the Climate and Environmental Sciences Division (CESD), including the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) scientific user facility and the ASR program to improve understanding and [...]
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Ian Williams is among many national laboratory scientists developing new ways to integrate land-atmosphere interactions into climate-predictive models.
Ian N. Williams is a research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), where he is principal investigator in a program called Land-Atmosphere Coupling and Convection in the Water Cycle.
More broadly, his research involves many threads [...]
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Scientists Gather in Argentina to Study the World’s Largest Convective Storms
The Sierras de Córdoba mountain range in north-central Argentina is the birthplace of the largest thunderstorms on Earth. These are the type of storms that contribute most of the rainfall to many regions of the world. Yet to date, a fine-tuned sense of how they [...]
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To Improve Models, ASR Researchers Tap Doppler Lidars to Estimate the Critical Cloud-Base Updrafts and Downdrafts that Carry Heat and Moisture
Cumulus clouds, low and rain-free, get their name from the Latin word for “heap.” With flat bases and puffy upper surfaces, such clouds appear to bubble into the sky, turning grey at the bottom and [...]
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A newly available principal investigator (PI) product —the Merged Multisensor Cloud-Precipitation Mask and Cloud Type Data for GoAmazon2014/15—can now be used by scientists to better characterize cloud and precipitation profiles of all conditions, including periods of heavy precipitation from storms, as well as validate-model simulations.
These data are provided by ASR-supported researchers, Zhe Feng of Pacific [...]
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Modeler and observationalist Adam Varble tells how he got into atmospheric science by falling in love with storms
“I consider myself a weather weenie,” says Adam Varble.
He is an atmospheric scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, on the arid eastern side of the Cascade Mountains. Every day, he takes time out from [...]
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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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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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