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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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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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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program is 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 expected to advance graduate students’ doctoral theses/dissertations while providing access [...]
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For the second year in a row, a major snowstorm hit during the Joint User Facility/Principal Investigator Meeting in Tysons, Virginia. The storm impacted the travel plans of some of the more than 300 Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Facility staff members and Atmospheric System Research (ASR) principal investigators who registered to attend the March 19 [...]
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"Engage with data in useful ways," says NASA veteran
Earth system modeler Anthony D. “Tony” Del Genio is a three-decade NASA veteran. Away from the job, he is an avid fan of “Doctor Who,” and a wine enthusiast who builds vacations around vineyards. But you won’t find him away from the job much.
From his office at [...]
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A project aims to improve how ice cloud microphysics is represented in models
The clouds we see every day are composed of water and ice. Microphysical processes govern the many ways cloud-making water drops and ice particles grow, shrink, stick together, break up, and fall. In turn, cloud microphysics influence the atmospheric dynamics that create clouds [...]
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Research funded by ASR on the power of aerosols is the focus of a new paper in the journal Science. While scientists have known that aerosols may play an important role in shaping weather and climate, this study shows that the smallest of particles have a big effect: Particles smaller than one-thousandth the width of a [...]
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The two-lab, multi-partner effort includes a strong collaboration between experimentalists and modelers
Clouds in all their forms are familiar, but scientists still grapple with understanding the processes that influence their shapes, sizes, and life cycles.
These vastly consequential bodies of ice and water hold and dispense rain and snow, cast shadows from the sun, and blanket the [...]
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