News & Events for 2021

Plans for the 2021 NDACC Steering Committee annual meeting are underway. Originally scheduled to take place at the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction (NCWCP) in College Park, MD, the meeting has been changed to a virtual format because of ongoing COVID-19 restrictions.

As presented at recent Steering Committee Meetings the NDACC DHF has been transitioning from service at NOAA/CPC to NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC). In the Fall 2020 meeting we noted that the DHF at LaRC was running in mirror mode, with all files running through the format/ingest codes.

A Cooperating Network Agreement between NDACC and the European Brewer Network (EUBREWNET) was finalized on 19 April 2021.

The new NDACC Lidar Working Group (LWG) website features a review of the NDACC lidar stations and instruments, with new links and functionality to check data availability and access them. Fine-tuning of the website content will continue over the upcoming weeks.

Updates and corrections to the GMI chemical mechanism and its input files have been used to create a new Hindcast simulation with MERRA2 meteorology. The changes compared to the previous GMI simulation are generally small and you probably won’t see any large impacts on chemical constituents.

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is the third most important greenhouse gas (GHG) after carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Its global warming potential is about 300 times larger than CO2 for a 100 year timescale. Surface in-situ observations show that N2O is steadily rising since the 1970's.

Worldwide efforts to contain spreading of the COVID-19 pandemic have reduced emissions from surface traffic by about 15% on average over the year 2020. Air-traffic (and emissions) went down by 40% on average.

As previously announced, we currently are making plans to hold the 2021 NDACC Steering Committee meeting in College Park, MD, the week of 13–17 September 2021. With the ongoing restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, it remains unclear if we will be able to have a face-to-face meeting this year.

Congratulations to Dr. Ryan Stauffer for his appointment to a Civil Service position in the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Laboratory within the Earth Sciences Division! This appointment is effective 1 March 2021.