Environmental and Climate research at Brookhaven National Lab is focused on aerosol chemistry and microphysics, aerosol related infrastructure, climate and process modeling, cloud processes, data management and software engineering, terrestrial ecosystems, meteorological services, and tracer technologies.
Aerosol Chemistry & Microphysics
Focused on improving process-level understanding of aerosol formation and evolution mechanisms, aerosol absorption, and the direct and indirect influences that aerosols have on clouds, precipitation and climate.
Aerosol Related Infrastructure
Provides measurement capabilities to the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program for long-term measurements of aerosols and their precursors across a global network of ground- and aircraft-based locations.
Climate and Process Modeling
Uses multi-scale process modeling and observational analyses to understand the processes essential to clouds, precipitation, land-atmosphere interactions, and urban impacts.
Cloud Processes
Seeks to improve understanding of microphysical and dynamical processes that impact the lifecycle of clouds to improve their representation in climate models.
Technology Development & Applications and Meteorological Services
Responsible for the maintenance, calibration, data collection and data archiving for the weather instrumentation network associated with BNL's atmospheric dispersion concerns.
Terrestrial Ecosystem Science & Technology
Seeks to improve the representation of ecosystem processes in Earth System Models in order to increase our ability to understand and project global change.
Tracer Technologies
The Tracer Technology Group uses perfluorocarbon tracers as a tool for understanding the processes that transport air, heat, water, and pollutants.
Funding Agencies
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JAN
30
Thursday
Environmental & Climate Sciences Department Seminar
"A NIST Perspective on Quantifying Aerosol Optical Properties: Metrology Challenges and Opportunities"
Presented by Jimmy Radney, NIST
11 am, Large Conference Room, Bldg. 490
Thursday, January 30, 2020, 11:00 am
Hosted by: Ernie Lewis
Atmospheric aerosols directly affect the earth's energy balance through the scattering and absorption of solar radiation. While aerosols are expected to have a net negative forcing (i.e. cooling), the actual magnitude of this effect remains highly uncertain due to physical, chemical, spatial and temporal variability. To complicate matters, strongly absorbing carbonaceous aerosols (i.e. black carbon, BC) exhibit a positive radiative forcing rivaling methane. A better understanding of the magnitude of these aerosol-radiation interactions requires a multi-pronged approach with fundamental metrology (e.g. instrumentation, methods, standards and calibrations) utilizing well-characterized systems under controlled conditions representing just one piece of the puzzle. Highlights of recent projects at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will be presented including: 1) the characterization and use of a water-stabilized carbon black (CB) nanomaterial that mimics aged BC that can be used to calibrate aerosol instrumentation, 2) results from the first-ever photoacoustic spectrometer intercomparison study, 3) variability in the aerosol absorption spectra of highly-absorbing carbonaceous aerosols from a variety of sources and 4) aerosol absorption spectra of terrestrial mineral dusts and Martian soil simulants.
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FEB
13
Thursday
Environmental & Climate Sciences Department Seminar
"Tropical Deep Convection and Entrainment in Idealized Cloud-Resolving Models"
Presented by Usama Anber, Environmental & Climate Sciences Dept (BNL)
11 am, Large Conference Room, Bldg. 490
Thursday, February 13, 2020, 11:00 am
Hosted by: Mike Jensen
Global Climate Models (GCMs) are depicted as the holy grail of climate science. However, they are far from reliably simulating the current and future climate. One of the components that represents a source of errors and biases in these models is the convective parametrization scheme and the ad-hoc treatment of deep convection and entrainment. In this talk, I will focus on two tropical atmospheric events that GCMs struggle to simulate: Amazonian deep precipitating convection, and the Madden Julian Oscillations. I will present how idealized cloud-resolving models (CRMs) coupled with simulated and forced large-scale circulation can capture the essential dynamics of these events. In particular, when diagnosed from the CRMs, I will show that entrainment is merely a response to the convective regime and cannot have a constant rate as GCMs suggest. If time allows, I will also point out to another potential source of biases in the simulated mean climate stemming from the representation of numerical noise damping in the model dynamical core.
The Environmental & Climate Sciences Department is part of the Environment, Biology, Nuclear Science & Nonproliferation Directorate at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
