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The first Coast-Urban-Rural Atmospheric Gradient Experiment (CoURAGE) science team meeting will be held June 6, 2024, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. There is an online attendance option as well. Registration for in-person or virtual attendance is open until May 1. There is no cost to register.

In response to community feedback, ARM is committed to making its calibration processes more transparent. The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility has a robust calibration ecosystem

ecosystem

A natural community of plants, animals, and other living organisms and the physical environment in which they live and interact.

Source: A student's guide to Global Climate Change Source

for its instruments. Regular calibration to established standards or reference instruments and ongoing calibration checks (verifications) help ARM ensure that it is providing the highest-quality measurements possible for scientists to conduct their research.

By now, the trends related to climate change

climate change

A change in the average conditions — such as temperature and rainfall — in a region over a long period of time.

Source: NASA Climate Kids Source

are clear: hotter days, more frequent strong storms and a host of other effects. In unparalleled facilities at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, researchers are helping to bring technologies for clean energy and climate resilience from the lab to the real world. During Earth Month, an occasion to highlight conservation and climate change efforts worldwide, here’s a look at how these Argonne centers are helping preserve and extend our resources.

If a tree falls in the forest — whether or not anyone registers the sound — one thing is for sure: there are lots of fungi around. Within a forest’s soil, hundreds of species decompose debris, mobilize nutrients from that decay, and deliver those nutrients to tree roots and soil. These fungi help shape a forest’s ecology.

ecology

The interrelationships between living organisms and their environments.

Source: NASA earth observatory Source

They store carbon and cycle key nutrients like nitrogen

nitrogen

Classified as a nonmetal, nitrogen is a gas at room temperature. Nitrogen dilutes oxygen and prevents rapid burning at the Earth's surface, and accounts for ~78 percent of Earth's atmosphere.

Source: National library of medicine Source

and phosphorus.

A team led by atmospheric scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory has demonstrated the first-ever remote observations of the fine-scale structure at the base of clouds. The results, just published in the Nature publication NPJ Climate and Atmospheric Science, show that the air-cloud interface is not a perfect boundary but rather is a transition zone where aerosol

aerosols

Small particles or droplets, such as wildfire smoke, volcanic gases, or salty sea spray, that float in the air. They are emitted by both natural events and human activities.

Source: NASA Global Climate Change Source

particles suspended in Earth’s atmosphere give rise to the droplets that ultimately form clouds.

Caribbean islands are starting to shift away from importing expensive fossil fuels, using instead their own abundant sun and wind to make electricity. However, their frequent hurricanes can put a damper on solar energy generation. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a comprehensive modeling method to better predict the drop in electricity generation when these storm clouds overshadow solar panels.