8 February 2018
Many from the NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) leadership team visited ESRL this week to attend one of the quarterly Senior Research Council (SRC) meetings. This two-day meeting had a full schedule and approximately 40 people in attendance. A small but informative poster session was held in the David Skaggs Research Center cafeteria atrium midday Wednesday, where several ESRL scientists shared their latest research accomplishments.
Craig McLean, NOAA Assistant Administrator for Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, talked with researchers Patrick Veres and Andy Neuman about CSD's new Time of Flight Mass Spectrometer (ToF-MS). The instrument flew 78,000 km around the world in October 2017 on the NASA DC8 aircraft for the Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom). Craig gave the research team a dollar bill when he learned on a previous visit that their detector was a very expensive instrument. The team responded by giving that dollar a trip around the world, over the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans from the Arctic to Antarctica. The instrument provided high precision measurements of halogen and nitrogen compounds from 0.2 to 14 km altitude. These new observations will improve understanding of atmospheric chemical composition and improve global models of atmospheric chemistry and climate.