High background levels of ozone pollution make it hard for Las Vegas and other southwestern cities to meet US air quality standards in spring, two NOAA studies find. But local pollution sources drive summer's high ozone days.
When Super Bowl LVI kicks off at the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles on February 13, a nearby command center operated by emergency managers will include NOAA experts.
When COVID-19 pandemic began in the US, counties and cities across the nation imposed stay at home orders, closed schools or imposed travel restrictions. From March 2020 onward, many Americans hung up car keys and settled into their homes for work and school. Traffic patterns dramatically changed, and previously smog filled vistas became clearer.
NOAA and NIST have installed a Doppler lidar instrument to an existing weather station on top of the Department of Commerce’s Herbert Clark Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. to measure wind flow and turbulence in the lowest part of the atmosphere for a research project studying greenhouse gas emissions in the Capitol area.
The giant methane cloud spotted by satellite over the U.S. Southwest that made national headlines in 2014 wasn’t a persistent, undiscovered “hotspot” as first thought, but the result of a nightly atmospheric condition and topography that trapped industrial and natural emissions of the potent greenhouse gas near the ground in the basin overnight, according to new research published in the journal Elementa by CIRES and NOAA.
NOAA's HRRR-Smoke model may still be designated as experimental, but when wildfires are burning, many count on it for smoke forecasts.
Running on the newest version of NOAA’s Global Forecast System, or GFS, the FV3-Chem model forecasts the distribution of some primary air pollutants: smoke, soot, organic carbon, sulfate, and large and small particles of dust and sea salt - collectively known as aerosols. Because these aerosols affect the weather, the model also provides weather forecasts.
A NOAA study published in Nature Geosciences takes a new look at faint, old smoke and finds that it is just as important an influence on the climate as the thick plumes produced by active fires.