Dust Achieves Lofty Aspirations
Instead of dust-bunnies under the sofa, this dust helps form ice crystals that are at the heart of clouds. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used dust's loftier disposition to create a new way to calculate how all particles, not just dust, attract and form ice crystals in clouds.
L. Ruby Leung Appointed Editor of Journal of Hydrometeorology
Congratulations to L. Ruby Leung, a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory research scientist, on being appointed to serve as one of three editors for the Journal of Hydrometeorology, published by the American Meteorological Society, beginning in 2012. The bi-monthly journal covers research areas related to the modeling, observing and forecasting of processes related to water and energy fluxes and storage terms.
Charles Long Receives 2012 World Meteorological Organization Väisälä Award for Research on Fractional Cloudiness
Congratulations to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Charles Long, together with the esteemed research team, on being winners of the 23rd Professor Dr. Vilho Väisälä Award for an Outstanding Research Paper on Instruments and Methods of Observation: "Optimized fractional cloudiness determination from five ground-based remote sensing techniques" published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
A Chemistry Tale of Two Carbons
City carbons and country carbons regularly mix in the atmosphere, but how do they get along? That is essentially the question being tackled by a team of scientists led by researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. In the 2010 Carbonaceous Aerosols and Radiative Effects Study (CARES) research campaign they amassed a rich data set that will shed light on key science questions: how do these carbons meet, mix, travel, grow old, and affect the Earth's climate? The scientific overview of the field research was published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics in August 2012.
How to Catch Aerosols in the Act
Grabbing a virtual tiger by the tail, scientists led by researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory directly linked a cloud's inclination to rain to its effects on the climate. Using global satellite data and complex calculations, they were able—for the first time—to develop a proxy measurement for one of the most vexing questions in atmospheric science: how tiny particles in the atmosphere affect the amount of cloud. Using this new metric, they showed that aerosols' effects on clouds are overestimated by as much as 30 percent in a global climate model.
Fresh Water Feeds Hurricanes' Fury
When hurricanes blow over ocean regions swamped with fresh water, the storm can unexpectedly intensify. According to a new study led by researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition, though the probability that hurricanes will hit these conditions is small—about 10 to 23 percent—the rate at which they intensify can be relatively higher when they do, by as much as 50 percent on average.
