International Study: 

Climate Change Irreversible

SPRING

Significant sea level rise, temperature increases, and shifts in rainfall are irreversible 

consequences of people’s emission of carbon dioxide, CO2, according to a new study led by 

ESRL’s Susan Solomon. Climate changes wrought by the greenhouse gas will persist for more 

than 1,000 years, the new study shows, even if people on this planet instantly stopped emitting 

carbon dioxide—by curbing the burning of fossil fuels in cars and power planets, among other 

actions.

“Current choices regarding carbon dioxide emissions will have legacies that will irreversibly 

change the planet,” Solomon said.

Solomon and her co-authors used climate models to ask what would happen if CO2 were 

allowed to build up to several different peak levels (all beyond today’s 385 parts per million), 

and if emissions were then cut off completely. The cutoff scenario is not a realistic one—CO2

emissions are increasing rapidly. Rather, it was selected to demonstrate the longevity of climate 

impacts.

Not only does some CO2 persist for millennia in the atmosphere, the planet’s surface would 

remain warmer and sea level would remain higher long after CO2 levels in the atmosphere 

began dropping, the authors found. The lingering effect is primarily due to the oceans, which 

currently buffer climate change. Today, oceans absorb much of the excess CO2 emitted by 

human activities, removing it from the atmosphere.

But the ability of the oceans to store carbon dioxide will reach a limit and slow down, 

notes Solomon. As it does, the ocean’s uptake of excess heat also slows, so the atmospheric 

temperature stays nearly constant for a millennium. 

In one of the scenarios considered in the new study, CO2 was allowed to peak at 450-600 parts 

per million before being cut off. That triggered persistent decreases in dry-season rainfall in 

2009

Inside

From the Director 2

Reconstructing History 3

Climate Services Update 4

Designing for Disaster 4 

From Pole to Pole 4

Geoengineering Problems 6

Technology Export 6

Upcoming @ ESRL 7

Hurricane Computer 7

Tower Drop 7

National Academy Study 9

Master of Science 9

Achievements, in Brief 10

India and Drought 12

ESRL Quarterly

News from NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory

Ozone Smog in Wyoming 

ESRL solves mystery of winter highs

HIPPO mission, p 6. The NCAR research jet HIAPER prepares to take off in a test flight for a pole-to-pole experiment. 

Ozone pollution is normally linked to 

hot summers in big cities, so researchers 

were puzzled when ozone levels soared 

dangerously high during the past three 

winters in a rural Wyoming gas field. At high 

levels, surface ozone can damage people’s 

lungs and harm ecosystems. 

Now, ESRL scientists have figured out 

how the pollutant forms in the cold, and 

their results suggest that wintertime ozone 

formation could be a more widespread 

problem than believed. 

“Rapid production of wintertime ozone 

is probably occurring in other regions of 

the western United States, in Canada, and 

around the world,” said ESRL’s Russ Schnell, 

Deputy Director of the Global Monitoring 

Division. Schnell was lead author of a new 

paper on the Wyoming ozone problem, 

see p 8

see p 8

Jonah Pinedale Anticline gas field in Wyoming. 

DEQ Wyo.

ESRL’s Susan Solomon leads study showing effects will last 1,000 years+
Director’s Corner

By the Numbers 

NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco has 

called for “a new social contract for science” 

stating that this contract “represents a commitment on the part of all scientists to devote their 

energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day . . .” (Lubchenco, 1998). How 

do we in ESRL see the results of our scientific 

efforts applied to the pressing problems of the 

day? Can our science affect the future, without 

putting us in a position of being advocates of 

specific policies? As Dan Albritton used to emphasize, we must assure that our policy relevant 

science is presented from the position of being 

honest brokers of scientific information.

The foundation of our research is taking observations, and using those observations to 

develop understanding of the natural world. In 

this issue there are several articles that illustrate 

this process, from the pole to pole observing in 

the HIAPER aircraft, to the Wyoming winter 

surface ozone and its causes. The use of this 

knowledge to protect and improve life on earth 

is the issue that Dr. Lubchenco raised, and that 

I believe we need to explicitly address.

One very important way we affect policy is 

by well written papers that describe what we 

have discovered about nature. Susan Solomon’s 

headline paper in this ESRL Quarterly points 

out that carbon dioxide’s effects operate on 

two time scales, one of which is very long—

thousands of years, for reasons related to ocean 

chemistry. Another part of Susan’s work draws 

on large, organized climate modeling efforts 

that were summarized in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth 

Assessment Report, projecting profound 

changes in temperature and precipitation. Susan has subsequently testified in Congress on 

irreversibility and other global change issues, a 

very direct way of informing our policymakers.

We also affect the future with assessments such 

at the IPCC and the Climate Change Science 

Program. These consolidated results of our 

science have been very effective in bringing 

governments to grips with the effect of humans 

on the planet, and in neutralizing the tendency 

of policymakers to make decisions based on 

scientific viewpoints that are widely divergent 

from those dominant in the refereed literature. 

The IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 

for clearly summarizing the results of the world 

community of researchers, a source of great 

pride for the important role that NOAA and 

ESRL have played.

There is another important avenue for scientific 

advances to affect the public and policymakers—through the systems we help to build. In 

ESRL, we have “systems” as our middle name; 

our strength is the formidable array of talent 

and experience we bring to the global earth 

system analysis problem. The importance of 

CarbonTracker, developed in the Global Monitoring Division, is an excellent example. It is 

clear that CarbonTracker is a start on the kind 

of analysis systems that will be very important 

in an era when carbon sources and sinks are 

closely monitored. Another example, featured 

on the next page, is the fascinating and important work by the Physical Sciences Division 

to use limited data and the Ensemble Kalman 

Filter to analyze the full global atmosphere. The 

ability to start with very few surface observations and recreate the global field with high 

fidelity has implications for our earth system 

analysis plans. These techniques can be extended to, for example, greatly improve analysis of 

global chemistry. Earth system analysis, led in 

the climate program by ESRL’s Randy Dole, will 

bring together information on the entire earth 

system—atmosphere, ocean, ice, chemistry, 

biology, etc. Also, within our Global Systems 

Division are some of the world’s best data, computing and numerical modeling people, and 

systems. ESRL thus combines the scientists trying to understand the earth system, and the scientific and technical expertise to put improved 

understanding into analysis and prediction 

models of weather and climate. 

There are many other ways that our science 

and technology can be policy relevant and 

make a difference on the “problems of the day.” 

I believe that ESRL is unique in the breadth of 

its science and technology, going from better 

understanding to the full earth system models 

on which much policy will be based. ESRL thus 

directly addresses the great issue for the future: 

How will the earth system respond as anthropogenic drivers increase in scope and intensity?

—Alexander MacDonald

Lubchenco, J, 1998, Entering the New Century of the 

Environment: A New Social Contract for Science, Science, 

279.

The Bassi supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Lawrence 

Berkeley National Laboratory.

The number of CPU hours—on supercomputers at Lawrence Berkeley 

National Laboratory—it took to run a “reanalysis” of global atmospheric 

conditions for 1908 to 1958, based on historic weather measurements. 

That’s 192 years on a single PC (see p 3).

1,679,394

LBNL 2

How Does ESRL Science Serve Society?
Today, weather instruments around the 

globe collect millions of observations 

daily, giving forecasters and others a fairly 

comprehensive view of the global atmosphere 

and upcoming weather. A century ago, a few 

hundred observers on land and sea—most in 

the Northern Hemisphere—recorded a few 

thousand observations a day, at best. Now, 

ESRL researchers and colleagues around 

the world have produced realistic guesses at 

historic atmospheric conditions, based on 

sparse observations and an understanding of 

the way the atmosphere behaves today. This is 

the kind of detailed information that climate 

and weather researchers and historians have 

longed for, but accurate information has not 

been available beyond the past 60 years. The 

20th Century Reanalysis project will eventually 

provide global surface and lower atmosphere 

weather data from the 1870s to the present. 

Led by ESRL researchers, an international 

research team used Department of Energy 

supercomputers to stitch together sparse 

historic observations into an image of the 

most-likely atmospheric conditions at the 

time. Their conclusions, they hope, will not 

only help historians understand how weather 

affected key events, but will help climate 

modelers understand Earth’s future.

The 20th Century Reanalysis Project started 

when NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center 

and the National Center for Atmospheric 

Research began digitizing and making 

available original manuscript weather 

observations from the past 100 years. Building 

on the availability of these data, ESRL Physical 

Sciences Division and CIRES researchers 

Gil Compo, Jeff Whitaker, Prashant 

Sardeshmukh, and Nobuki Matsui proved to 

skeptics that by analyzing barometric pressure 

observations it would be possible to figure 

out the atmospheric patterns that created past 

weather conditions. 

This research team wanted to produce a more 

extensive and improved historical dataset by 

combining the digitized observations from 

the past 100 years. With the vast amount 

of historical observations now available, 

powerful computing resources would be 

required to generate this huge dataset. 

Compo and his colleagues won a series of 

three Department of Energy INCITE Awards, 

giving them access to supercomputers at 

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

During more than one million processing 

hours in the last three years, the team 

integrated a reanalysis model over many 

possible weather scenarios, and combined 

the possibilities with the available pressure 

observations to produce 6-hourly historical 

weather maps. The first version of the data is 

freely available and covers the period 1908-

1958. 

With the data, researchers will be able to 

understand a broad range of past weather 

variations, including conditions that led to 

historically notable events such as the 1930s 

Dust Bowl. Some of the data are already 

in use by researchers in Canada studying 

atmospheric conditions associated with the 

fatal Mallory Expedition of 1924. British 

climbers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine 

were attempting the first documented summit 

of Mt. Everest when they disappeared in an 

unexpected storm. 

G.W. Kent Moore of the University of 

Toronto’s Department of Physics has long 

been interested in high-altitude meteorology, 

especially around Mt. Everest, and in 

understanding the weather systems that 

give rise to really bad storms. “I was always 

interested in the most famous disappearance 

with the first serious attempt to summit Mt. 

Everest,” said Moore. “Mallory and Irvine 

disappeared into what was described as some 

sort of blizzard. It was never known if they 

made the summit.”

Digging around in original records from 

the Royal Geographical Society, Moore was 

surprised to learn that during the expedition, 

pressure and temperature data had been 

collected at the base camp. These observations 

showed a huge pressure drop of 18 mb—the 

largest drop that Moore had seen in the 

region’s recorded history—which would mean 

that this was a much more serious storm 

than people originally thought. Interestingly 

these observations were published in 1926, 

but no discussion or comments on this major 

pressure drop ever developed.

Moore then found out about the 20th Century 

Reanalysis Project, and asked Compo for a 

look at the 1908-1958 data, which had just 

been compiled. The pressure drop was actually 

due to a large-scale weather system called a 

“western disturbance,” Moore found. Western 

disturbances are now known to be responsible 

for much of the bad weather in the Himalayas. 

“What is remarkable about this incredibly rich 

data set is that it reconstructs the state of the 

atmosphere, and for the first time we have a 

three-dimensional look at it,” said Moore. “It’s 

a wonderful tool for looking deeper back in 

time.”

Reanalysis is also a powerful tool for 

researchers looking forward in time, Compo 

said. By better understanding historic 

variability in the atmosphere, researchers can 

both improve climate models and learn to 

discern changes in weather variability, which 

may be associated with climate change. 

—Contributed by Barb DeLuisi

Reconstructing History

Understanding past weather to improve forecasts

Above: NOAA photograph of the Dust Bowl and a historic 

photo of Mallory’s fated Everest expedition. 

At left: A manual analysis of the atmosphere during 

the Tri-State Tornado Outbreak of 18 March 1925, the 

deadliest tornado in US history (courtesy of R Maddox, 

retired, Tucson, Ariz). 

At right: The ensemble mean sea level pressure 

analysis—which did not use any of the observations 

shown in the manual analysis—produces a nearly 

identical pattern.

On the Web: http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/data/gridded/

data.20thC_Rean.html

3
From Pole to Pole

ESRL’s Marty Ralph is part of a multiagency 

science team developing a severe hazard 

scenario in California, for a public awareness 

campaign later this year. Last November, the 

US Geological Survey and others conducted 

“The Great Southern California Shakeout.” 

Millions of everyday citizens and thousands 

of emergency responders participated in the 

earthquake awareness activity—the biggest of 

its kind in US history.

Now Ralph, in ESRL’s Physical Sciences 

Division, and colleagues are coming up with a 

scenario in which the danger comes from the 

sky, not below ground. The new hazard will 

involve a devastating—but entirely plausible—

winter storm with winds reaching Category 4 

hurricane force, up to 20 inches of rainfall in 

one day, major flooding in both northern and 

southern California, heavy snow in the Sierra 

Nevada Mountains, extensive power outages, 

and heavy surf and coastal erosion. 

ESRL scientists and colleagues in the National 

Weather Service are already involved in 

detecting and improving the forecasts of 

severe winter storms in California, which are 

known to present a major flood hazard in 

much of California, Ralph said. State officials 

have made it a priority to plan for one. 

Students at the Art Center College of 

Design in Pasadena, Calif., will help the 

hazards scenario teams figure out how to 

communicate effectively with the public 

about winter storm dangers and about the 

preparedness drill itself. In January, Ralph 

talked with design students about winter 

storms and emergency communications, as 

part of a “Hazard Communication Forum.”

Designing for Disaster

Climate Services Update

 A new National Climate Service (NCS) is 

taking shape within NOAA, with ESRL’s help. 

In late January, Deputy Undersecretary Mary 

Glackin announced the appointment of Tom 

Karl as Director of NOAA’s Climate Services, 

and Chet Koblinsky as Deputy Director. 

NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco spoke 

about her commitment to forming a NOAA 

National Climate Service during her Senate 

confirmation hearing, a service that would 

resemble, in some ways, the National Weather 

Service. “I heard firsthand from businesses 

and state and local governments about the 

need for better information and predictions 

about the impacts of climate change in 

communities all across this country,” 

Lubchenco said. “From concern about 

droughts and sea level rise to changes in the 

chemistry of the ocean, there is a real hunger 

for more and better information.” 

There has been strong ESRL involvement in 

the development of the new Service. ESRL’s 

Randall Dole, chief scientist of the Physical 

Sciences Division, and Susan Solomon, 

senior scientist in the Chemical Sciences 

Division, are co-leading a team of NOAA 

staff writing one of the NCS foundational 

documents, which will define strategic goals 

and principles of the Service. This document 

will provide basic guidance for the subsequent 

development of an implementation plan and 

identification of priorities. 

ESRL’s Dole, Robin Webb, and Roger Pulwarty 

participated in early planning activities, 

which involved input from the private sector 

and across government. An external review 

committee, chaired by Eric Barron of the 

National Center for Atmospheric Research, 

reviewed an initial draft plan and has 

submitted recommendations regarding needs 

for a National Climate Service to NOAA’s 

Science Advisory Board. The National 

Research Council originally outlined a vision 

for the agency in 2001. 

Marty Ralph (left) and students (right) at the Hazard Communication Forum. 

HIPPO Mission: a global picture of 

the atmosphere, greenhouse gases

4

Carbon dioxide and other pollutants are 

higher in concentration over the Arctic 

than many scientists expected, and more 

oxygen is piling up over the Southern 

Ocean, according to initial data from 

HIPPO, a multiagency, multiyear mission 

to paint a three-dimensional portrait of the 

atmosphere.

In January, a modified corporate jet 

took a roller-coaster tour of the planet, 

looping from pole to pole with two ESRL 

scientists among those on board, and five 

ESRL instruments. Researchers captured 

the most detailed measurements yet of 

greenhouse gases, ozone, particles, and 

other atmospheric constituents, from 78oN 

to 68oS latitude and 0 to 15 km altitude. 

That information is critical for both climate 

modelers seeking to understand Earth’s 

future, and policy makers, who rely on 

accurate science for decision making.

Led by Harvard University’s Steve Wofsy, 

HIPPO is jointly operated and supported 

by the National Science Foundation, 

the National Center for Atmospheric 

Research, and NOAA ESRL. The mission 

was designed to fill the relatively empty 

observation space between satellites—

which often can’t profile the vertical 

structure of the atmosphere—and the 

ground-based instruments of ESRL’s Global 

Monitoring Division and other networks. 

“We’re bridging that gap,” said Jim Elkins, 

a HIPPO co-investigator and scientist 

with ESRL’s Global Monitoring Division. 

“We’ve had some flights over parts of North 

America, and some satellites give broad 

coverage of the stratosphere, but they 

can have trouble getting down into the 

troposphere,” Elkins said.

An early look at HIPPO data suggests great 

success, he said. “We got a cross-section of 

the atmosphere, up and down, from pole to 

pole. We have never done this before.” 

HIPPO Tracks
NCAR

ESRL’s Fred Moore gets ready for a test HIPPO flight out of the Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport. 

5

HIPPO: HIAPER Pole-to-Pole-Observations.

HIAPER: the High-performance Instrumented 

Airborne Platform for Environmental Research, 

owned by the National Science Foundation 

and operated by the National Center for 

Atmospheric Research. 

ESRL Instruments: UCATS, PANTHER, NWAS, 

SP2, and Classical O3

 measure trace gases, 

ozone, water vapor, and black carbon aerosols.

During January’s journey, a series of 11 

flights spanning the globe, HIAPER dipped 

to within a few hundred feet of the ground 

and ocean, and soared up into the lower 

stratosphere, 45,000 feet high. The mission 

was the first of what will be five globespanning journeys in the next three years, 

spread out among seasons and focused on 

areas that are not well sampled, especially 

the Southern Hemisphere and oceans.

“We’d really like to know more about the 

budgets of greenhouse gases and black 

carbon particles, the sources and sinks 

of these materials on the surface of the 

Earth, how they get into the atmosphere, 

how they get moved around,” Wofsy said 

during a press conference after January’s 

flights. “If people are going to actually make 

treaties that ban or restrain the use of these 

materials, those treaties have to be based on 

sound scientific knowledge.” 

NCAR’s Britt Stephens told reporters that 

the CO2

 piling up in the Arctic is likely 

a result of industrial emissions from the 

Northern Hemisphere and the wintertime 

“exhaling” of the terrestrial biosphere. 

The slightly higher-than-expected oxygen 

measured over the Southern Ocean 

may help researchers 

better understand 

carbon dynamics in that 

understudied region, 

Stephens said.

Fred Moore from ESRL’s 

Global Monitoring 

Division, and Josh Schwarz 

from the Chemical Sciences 

Division flew on HIPPO. 

Schwarz was responsible for 

a Soot Particle Photometer, 

SP2, which measures black 

carbon particles—the 

instrument was on its 

first global mission. Black 

carbon can absorb solar radiation and warm 

the surrounding atmosphere. “It could have 

a lot of radiative effects, globally, but it hasn’t 

yet been studied extensively,” Schwarz said.

HIPPO’s third set of flights was expected 

to provide “ground truthing” 

support for NASA’s Orbiting 

Carbon Observatory, OCO, 

which failed during launch in 

February. OCO’s loss makes 

HIPPO data even more 

valuable, said David Fahey, 

with ESRL’s Chemical Sciences 

Division and a member of the 

HIPPO science team. “The 

datasets are stunning,” Fahey 

said. “These are pseudosatellite profiles of important 

gases and particles across 

a vast region of the remote 

atmosphere.” 

The scientists who flew on HIPPO said the 

first leg of the mission was a stunning one 

visually, as well. “It’s quite an experience to 

fly an airplane at one point in time above 

the ice sheets, above the floating ice in the 

Arctic Ocean, with the waves there and the 

moonlight illuminating it, and then a short 

while later to be in American Samoa, a 

tropical paradise and then a short while later, 

in New Zealand, and a short while after that 

in the Southern Ocean,” Wofsy said. “It really 

gave us a tremendous aesthetic impression of 

the whole atmosphere and the connectedness 

of the globe.”

“It really gave us 

a tremendous 

aesthetic impression 

of the whole 

atmosphere and the 

connectedness of the 

globe.”

—Steve Wofsy
Proposals to lessen global warming by 

shooting light-scattering particles into the 

stratosphere could significantly reduce solar 

power production, a new ESRL study shows. 

To slow climate change, several climate 

scientists have described geoengineering 

schemes, which would attempt to cool the 

planet by injecting particles into the upper 

atmosphere. Such “aerosol loading” would 

be similar to the effect of volcanic eruptions, 

which create particles that scatter sunlight to 

outer space and cool Earth’s surface.

ESRL’s Dan Murphy, in the Chemical Sciences 

Division, calculated that one unintended 

consequence of a successful geoengineering 

scheme would be a significant drop in power 

generation by concentrating solar facilities—a 

20 percent loss in one scenario. Solar and 

other types of alternative energy are expected 

to be part of a transition away from carbonintensive fuels. 

Aerosols would not only reflect sunlight 

to outer space, Murphy pointed out in the 

paper, published in March in Environmental 

Geoengineering Problems

Australian meteorologists are now using 

customized ESRL technology to issue detailed, 

daily weather forecasts for the Victoria 

region, including parts of Australia hit hard 

by wildfires this year. This is the second 

international technology transfer for the 

Graphical Forecast Editor, or GFE, which 

is also being used in Taiwan for marine 

forecasts.

GFE was developed in ESRL’s Forecast 

Systems Laboratory, now the Global Systems 

Division, and the system has been operational 

in the US National Weather Service since 

2004. GFE translates the geographical outputs 

of weather models into gridded data points, 

so users can click on a location and obtain a 

detailed forecast. 

Before GFE, US forecasters used model 

output as guidance, then typed out forecasts 

associated with geographical regions. To 

obtain a forecast for a particular point, a user 

would either rely on the regional forecast, or 

would call up a forecaster and ask for a new 

analysis at the point of interest.

Now, forecasters in the Bureau of 

Meteorology’s Victorian Regional Forecast 

Centre are using GFE to prepare gridded 

databases of forecasting output, from 

temperature and clouds to precipitation and 

winds. 

In February, devastating bushfires struck 

central and eastern Victoria, killing at least 

210 people and destroying thousands of 

homes. The fires occurred on an exceptionally 

hot and windy day, with many places 

recording a record maximum temperature. 

“The GFE provided a number of important 

operational benefits to support the provision 

of fire weather forecasts during this event,” 

Jon Gill, GFE Project Manager in the Bureau 

of Meteorology, wrote in an email. The GFE, 

combined with other weather packages 

used by forecasters, enabled “exceptionally 

accurate” forecasts, Gill said. The Premier of 

Victoria was able to warn citizens, the day 

before the worst fires, “I’ve been briefed on the 

latest weather forecast for tomorrow and it’s 

going to be, probably by a long way, the worst 

day ever in the history of the State in terms of 

the temperatures and the winds.”

GFE also helped forecasters send detailed, 

site-specific forecasts to the field, both leading 

up to fires and during firefighting, when 

conditions were changing rapidly and updates 

were critical, Gill wrote. 

Before the fires, the day after the Bureau 

of Meteorology began using GFE, Gill sent 

an email thanks to ESRL’s GFE Team (Carl 

Bullock, Tracy Hansen, Tom Lefebvre, 

Mike Romberg, Mark Mathewson, and Joe 

Wakefield of the Global Systems Division). 

“Firstly, you gave us a terrific system to 

start with.... Secondly, your help in further 

developing the GFE to our requirements has 

been superb,” Gill wrote.

The State Agency for Meteorology in Spain is 

in the planning stages for adapting the GFE 

for their operations. During the American 

Meteorological Society meeting in January, 

an official from the Meteorological Society of 

India asked Lefebvre for detailed information 

on GFE, and expressed interest in using 

the system for weather forecasting in India. 

Several private companies are also using GFE 

for their operations. 

Technology Export

DOE/NREL

Science and Technology. Particles would also 

scatter sunlight to Earth as diffuse radiation, 

reducing the direct sunlight on which 

concentrating solar facilities depend. 

Murphy calculated the reduction in direct 

sunlight using basic physics, and he verified 

the numbers with data following the eruption 

of the Philippine volcano Mt. Pinatubo, 

in 1991. Every 1 percent reduction in 

total sunlight reaching the Earth, Murphy 

concluded, would mean a 4 to 10 percent 

production loss for concentrated solar power. 

Passive solar designs would also be less 

efficient. 

Peak-power production could be hit harder 

than total power generation, because peak 

demand generally occurs during times of 

day when the sun takes a longer, slanted path 

through the atmosphere, Murphy noted.

He charted the output of a concentrating solar 

plant in California before and after the Mt. 

Pinatubo eruption, and found a 14 percent 

drop in annual solar output associated with 

the volcano, and a 34 percent reduction in 

summertime on-peak capacity. 

NASA 6
ESRL to Host Hurricane 

Computer

April 28-29: The First NOAA Testbed US Weather Research Program Workshop, to build 

collaborations and exchange information on a variety of testbed projects, including those 

from the Joint Hurricane Testbed, the HydroMeteorological Testbed, Collaborative Science, 

Technology, and Applied Research, the Societal Impacts Program, and the Development 

Testbed Center.

May 13-14: ESRL Global Monitoring Annual Conference, “21st Century Challenges for 

Long-Term Monitoring.”

May 26: ESRL will host approximately 20 Hollings, Educational Partnership Program and 

Interdisciplinary Scientific Environmental Technology scholars this summer. Please join Dr. 

MacDonald as he welcomes the students at a reception.

Tower Drop

A powerful new supercomputer is 

heading to ESRL this spring, to help 

scientists improve hurricane forecasts. 

The Linux cluster will be based on Intel’s 

latest member of its Xeon line, codenamed Nehalem. 

“This will be a development machine,” 

said Leslie Hart, a High-Performance 

Computing leader in ESRL’s Global 

Systems Division. “The idea is to develop 

and improve the next-generation models 

for hurricane prediction.” 

Hart said the new computer cluster will 

have at least 5,000 cores and will occupy 

about 15 racks, each 84 inches tall. He and his 

colleagues hope the “Nehalem Jet” is ready to 

churn out experimental hurricane track and 

intensity forecasts by August, when the US 

hurricane season approaches its peak. 

Steve Koch, Director of ESRL’s Global 

Systems Division, said ESRL will host the 

new computer, but researchers from across 

government and academia will be able to 

access it for hurricane research. The Nehalem 

Jet will likely be used to run a variety of 

research models, from ESRL’s experimental 

FIM (the Flow-following, finite-volume 

Icosahedral Model) to the National Center for 

Environmental Prediction’s Hurricane WRF 

(Weather Research and Forecasting) model. 

Last season, ESRL researchers and colleagues 

experimented with FIM (a global model) 

using model grid resolutions of 15 and 30 

km, to generate hurricane track forecasts, 

including running ensembles of models. 

FIM forecast the track of Hurricane Ike and 

several other tropical storms last year with 

impressive skill several days before landfall. 

However, running the experiment required 

intense computing power, and ESRL scientists 

relied on powerful computers at the Texas 

Advanced Computing Center. In the future, 

the new Nehalem Jet computer will enable 

more accurate forecasts from an improved 

higher-resolution version of FIM, and some 

of that work can be conducted in-house more 

easily. 

Running at even higher resolution than FIM 

is Hurricane WRF, a limited-area regional 

model that is planned to couple separate 

models of the ocean, atmosphere, and waves. 

Computer-intensive experiments may help 

researchers improve the ocean models, for 

example, or develop higher-resolution, larger 

ensembles of models to provide forecasters 

at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center with 

improved measures of forecast uncertainty.

The new computer will also let researchers 

experiment with incorporating Doppler radar 

and other data collected by the NOAA P-3 

hurricane hunter airplanes. In theory, those 

data could improve forecasts, but it is difficult 

to quickly quality-check and assimilate them 

into models. 

Funding for the new computer and 

supportive infrastructure—more than $6 

million—came from a late decision by the 

Bush Administration to boost the $4 million 

budget of NOAA’s Hurricane Forecast 

Improvement Project to about $17 million. 

The new computer will triple the computing 

power of NOAA’s Research and Development 

High-Performance Supercomputer, hosted by 

ESRL, Koch said.

On a calm March morning, ESRL researchers 

and engineers from Applied Research 

Associates, Inc. watched as their newlydeveloped ultralight dropsondes drifted 

950 feet down from the NOAA BAO tower 

in Erie, Colo. at about 10 m per second. 

“The drops were very successful,” said Russ 

Chadwick of ESRL’s Global Systems Division. 

“We experienced near-laboratory conditions.” 

The palm-sized, bullet-shaped capsules with 

long tyvex tails carried wafer-thin circuit 

boards comprising a microprocessor, GPS 

receiver, battery, and transducers that measure 

temperature, pressure, relative humidity, 

and wind speed/direction. The ultralight 

dropsondes weigh less than half as much as 

existing dropsondes, which is crucial, because 

the intention of the collaborative effort is to 

develop an instrument that can be deployed 

from ultralight Unmanned Aircraft Systems 

(UAS). Eventually, solar-powered UAS, 

capable of traveling for weeks over remote 

areas of the oceans, could carry dozens of 

ultralight dropsondes, enabling low-cost 

collection of key environmental observations. 

—contributed by Annie Reiser

Upcoming @ ESRL

ARA engineer Brian Zadler with an ultralight dropsonde. 

Annie Reiser 7
several subtropical areas, comparable to the 

1930s North American Dust Bowl. Affected 

areas included southern Europe, northern 

Africa, southwestern North America, 

southern Africa, and western Australia—and 

the effects lasted far beyond the year 3000. 

Regional impacts of that kind of drying 

could include diminished water supplies, 

increased fire frequency, ecosystem changes, 

and expanded deserts, Solomon and her 

colleagues wrote. 

ESRL Director Sandy MacDonald 

incorporated the new results into a February 

talk at the National Renewable Energy 

Laboratory, part of the Sustainable Energy and 

Atmospheric Sciences seminar series. “This 

is a really important paper,” MacDonald said. 

“We’re on a real freight train.” 

Pieter Tans, from ESRL’s Global Monitoring 

Division, said Solomon et. al did an excellent 

job focusing attention on the very serious 

problem of carbon dioxide’s longevity. 

Solomon’s co-authors were Gian-Kasper 

Plattner of the Institute of Biogeochemistry 

and Pollutant Dynamics in Switzerland, Reto 

Knutti of the Institute for Atmospheric and 

Climate Science in Switzerland, and Pierre 

Friedlingstein of the Institut Pierre Simon 

Laplace in France. 

Their research was widely covered by 

international media, with reports appearing in 

the New York Times, The Province (Canada), 

Gazeta do Sul (Brazil), and Le Monde 

(France). Andy Revkin, a New York Times 

reporter, asked John Sterman, an expert in 

risk perception at the Massachusetts Institute 

of Technology, for perspective. 

“It’s important that people not react to 

Solomon’s work with despair,” Sterman 

replied. “The Solomon paper should finally 

bury the idea that we can wait and see. It 

further strengthens the case for immediate, 

strong mitigation. The good news is that 

it’s getting cheaper every day to cut carbon 

emissions.” 

On the Web: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/01/28/0812721106.short and http://www.npr.org/

templates/story/story.php?storyId=99888903

Figure 3 from Solomon et al., PNAS. Expected decadallyaveraged changes in the global distribution of precipitation 

per degree of warming (% change in precipitation per 

degree of warming, relative to 1900-1950 baseline) in the 

dry season at each grid point, based upon a suite of 22 

Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models, for a midrange future scenario (A1B). White areas are where fewer 

than 16 of 22 models agree on the sign of change. Data are 

monthly averaged over several broad regions for the inset 

plots. Red lines show the best estimate (median) of the 

changes in these regions, while the red shading indicates 

the +/-1-sigma likely range (i.e., 2 out of 3 chance) across 

the models. 

published in the February 2 issue of Nature 

Geosciences. 

To form ozone, researchers and air quality 

regulators have long known that bright 

sunlight and hot weather can “cook” 

precursor chemicals—motor vehicle exhaust, 

industrial gases and other urban and natural 

emissions—into ozone. For that reason, the 

chemical is routinely monitored only between 

OZONE. In the upper atmosphere, the 

ozone layer absorbs some incoming 

solar radiation, protecting Earth’s 

surface from damage. On the surface, 

ozone is a pollutant, regulated by the 

Environmental Protection Agency 

because it can cause severe respiratory 

problems in people. Ozone also damages 

vegetation. 

8

...OZONE

...IRREVERSIBLE

April and October in the United States.

In Wyoming’s Jonah and Pinedale Anticline 

natural gas production site, JPA, ozone 

precursors were probably emitted in many 

ways by the 24-hour operation—by engines 

that powered compressors, by drilling rigs, by 

vehicles, and possibly through leaks and other 

processes. JPA is one of the largest and most 

concentrated natural gas fields in the United 

States. 

Ozone precursors emitted there, however, 

were thought to rise quickly enough in the 

atmosphere that they shouldn’t contribute to 

ground-level ozone. Regulators also believed 

that in winter, the Sun was too low in the sky 

to jump start the chemical reactions that lead 

to ozone. “Some thought the ozone must be 

coming from the stratosphere, or from Utah 

or Los Angeles, or maybe the instruments 

were defective,” said Schnell. 

His team focused on several frigid days in 

February 2008, when instruments near the 

JPA natural gas fields recorded ozone levels 

significantly higher than the Environmental 

Protection Agency standard of 75 parts per 

billion, ppb, averaged over 8 hours. At times 

that month, single-hour ozone averages 

topped 140 ppb, rivaling peak summertime 

levels of 150 ppb measured in highly polluted 

US cities.

The researchers discovered that ozone 

was rapidly produced in the fields when 

three factors converged: the presence of 

ozone-forming chemicals from natural gas 

operations, a strong temperature inversion 

that trapped the chemicals close to the 

ground, and extensive snow cover, which 

provided enough reflected sunlight to ignite 

the chemical reactions. 

Time-series analyses showed a repeated 

pattern leading to high-ozone events: 
Bujidmaa Borkhuu, a Mongolian researcher 

who worked to strengthen that country’s 

link in NOAA’s global air sampling network, 

understands how to network people, too. 

She will earn a Masters in Atmospheric 

Sciences this spring from the graduate 

school where her mentor, ESRL’s Russ 

Schnell, was the first student.

Borkhuu (Bujee) will graduate this 

spring from the University of Wyoming’s 

Department of Atmospheric Sciences. 

Schnell, now Deputy Director of ESRL’s 

Global Monitoring Division, graduated 

in 1974 and has worked more than three 

decades for NOAA and the Cooperative 

Institute for Research in Environmental 

Sciences.

Borkhuu’s research at UW deals with a new 

precision instrument to measure snowfall. 

More precise snowfall data are needed 

by weather modelers to improve forecast 

accuracy, and by water managers and 

others working on precipitation questions. 

Borkhuu is comparing data from the new 

hotplate instrument to conventional snow 

measurements.

“My calibration is working well,” she said, 

and the instrument is producing accurate 

data even in high-wind, high-elevation 

conditions. Borkhuu’s instrument is 

operating on a 30-meter tower above 

treeline in the aptly named Snowy Range 

west of Laramie, Wyo. 

In Mongolia, Borkhuu was recruited as a 

key player in NOAA’s network, ensuring 

air samples were properly collected and 

sent to Boulder for analysis at ESRL. The 

Mongolian program, begun in 1992, had 

suffered from gaps in documentation and 

sampling procedures. When Borkhuu took 

over, data quality improved and maintained 

its dependability during her 11-year run. 

“Bujee brought the Mongolian program up 

to our high standards,” Schnell said. “She 

also was instrumental in setting up airplane 

vertical measurements near Ulaanbaatar 

(the Mongolian capitol),” he said. 

Borkhuu knows the importance of data 

quality assurance better than many, as her 

mother was a physicist in a laboratory in 

Ulaanbaatar. As a girl, Borkhuu visited the 

laboratory and observed her mother’s work 

developing and calibrating instruments. 

After her graduation in May, Borkhuu is 

considering a PhD program, but may also 

look for a job in research, as a scientist who 

can collect and analyze precise hydrology 

data, including snow measurements. 

Precision in Ping-Pong seems to come 

naturally to Borkhuu as well. She has 

been table tennis champion of UW for 

two years running, and took second place 

in a February tournament against other 

Intermountain West college champs. 

—contributed by Carol Knight

Master of Science (and international relations)

THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 

launched in November 2008 a series of studies 

called America’s Climate Choices, requested 

by members of Congress seeking guidance 

on responding to climate change. The study 

is due in 2010, and its charge is to “investigate 

and study the serious and sweeping issues relating to global climate change and make recommendations regarding what steps must be 

taken and what strategies must be adopted 

in response to global climate change, including the science and technology challenges 

thereof.”

Experts from across the government, private 

industry, nongovernmental organizations, and 

research institutions will be organized into 

four panels, Limiting the Magnitude of Future 

Climate Change; Adapting to the Impacts; Advancing the Science; and Informing Effective 

Decisions and Actions. 

ESRL’s A.R. Ravishankara, Director of the 

Chemical Sciences Division, will participate in 

the panel on advancing science (as will Waleed Abdalati from the Cooperative Institute 

for Research in Environmental Sciences, at 

the University of Colorado at Boulder). Venkatachalam Ramaswamy, Director of NOAA’s 

Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in 

Princeton, NJ, will participate in the panel on 

informing decisions and actions. 

Susan Solomon, in ESRL’s Chemical Sciences 

Division, and Tom Karl, Director of NOAA’s 

Climate Services, are on the Climate Choices 

overarching committee, which will integrate 

the four panels’ findings and recommendations into a final report. 

Colorado Senator Mark Udall said the National 

Academies study is a critical one, as is ESRL’s 

involvement. “We need more information to 

help us understand how to limit the effects of 

climate change and how to best adapt to the 

environmental changes climate change will 

bring,” Udall said. 

Bujidmaa Borkhuu with University of Wyoming advisor, Jeff Snider. 

UW

Temperature inversions occurred, chemicalrich air became trapped near the ground, the 

sun rose, light scattered off the white snow, 

ozone levels surged, and precursor chemicals 

fell, consumed by the chemical reactions 

creating ozone.

“It’s as if at night, you spill a bunch of gasoline, 

and then you just wait for the match of the 

Sun in the morning,” Schnell said. 

Schnell’s co-authors were Sam Oltmans, Ryan 

Neely, and Allen White of ESRL; Maggie 

Endres of the Wyoming Department of 

Environmental Quality; and John Molenar of 

Air Resource Specialists, Inc., in Fort Collins, 

Colo. Ryan Neely is a graduate student at the 

University of Colorado at Boulder, and is the 

first recipient of the ESRL-CIRES Graduate 

Research Fellowship. 

—contributed by Anatta

9
Achievements, in Brief

The following sections—News, Honored, and Published—highlight a few 

measures of ESRL’s impact. 

News

First Public SphereCast

April 1, the Lawrence Hall of Science at the 

University of California, Berkeley, broadcast 

a live “SphereCast,” in which climate change 

researcher and Nobel laureate Stephen 

Schneider used ESRL’s Science On a 

Sphere® to illustrate his talk. 

Science On a Sphere®, SOS, is 

an educational tool invented 

by ESRL Director Alexander 

MacDonald, now installed 

in 35 museums and other 

institutions around the 

world. The giant luminous 

sphere displays animations of 

scientific data, from hurricanes to 

climate change. 

Lawrence Hall’s public SphereCast featured 

Stanford University’s Schneider, who spoke 

on “Global Warming: Is the Science Settled 

Enough for Policy?” while referring to data 

projected onto SOS. Schneider contributed 

to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel 

on Climate Change, which shared the 

2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice 

President Al Gore. Schneider’s face and 

voice were broadcast onto flat screens at 

museums around the world, side-by-side with 

simultaneous SOS broadcasts. “I am always 

game to help museums with whatever it takes 

to entrain the public—gimmicks, new media, 

cool devices, etc.,” Schneider said. “If it takes 

a new hi-tech gizmo to get people to listen, 

I’m game, as long as we have something worth 

their time to listen to.” 

Visitors

ESRL hosted dozens of visitors in the last 

three months, from elementary school 

students to a US Navy Rear Admiral. Three 

Iraqi scientists, Husam Hanna Habib, 

Ali Sabeeh Dawood, and Abdul Kareem 

Mohammad, who work for the country’s 

Ministry of Science and Technology, met 

with ESRL researchers in February, to 

discuss weather forecasting, instrumentation, 

renewable energy, and other issues. The 

group was in Boulder primarily to work 

with Randolph Ware, chief scientist for 

Radiometrics, which builds and sells 

sophisticated meteorological instruments. 

ESRL also hosted the Joint Interagency 

Coordination Group of the US Northern 

Command in January, to discuss NOAA 

research activities and plans in the Arctic, 

and the information needs of the Northern 

Command in the region. In December, 

Kris Sarri, of the US Senate Committee on 

Commerce, toured ESRL’s four divisions, with 

NOAA officials from Legislative Affairs and 

the Climate Program Office.

Global Hawk Unveiling

In January, NASA and NOAA officials 

unveiled two Global Hawks, unmanned 

aircraft built by Northrop Grumman, 

which will be used in atmospheric research 

beginning this spring. The Global Hawks, 

better known for use in military 

operations, can fly for up to 

30 hours, up to 65,000 

feet, and can carry a 

payload—including 

scientific instruments—

of up to 2,000 pounds. 

ESRL’s David Fahey, Sara 

Summers, and Robbie 

Hood attended the Global 

Hawks January debut ceremony 

at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research 

Center in Edwards, Calif. This spring, NASA 

and NOAA will launch GloPac (Global Hawk 

Pacific Mission), a mission to validate Earthobserving satellite measurements, observe 

stratospheric trace gases, track dust and 

smoke crossing the Pacific from Asia and 

Siberia, and study atmospheric rivers carrying 

moist air into the US West Coast.

Multicultural Conference

ESRL’s PHASE program (Practical Handson Application to Science Education) 

co-sponsored an African heritage youth 

leadership conference at the University of 

Colorado in January. More than 80 Boulder 

Valley School District students attended the 

conference, organized by the district’s Office 

of Institutional Equity and Multicultural 

Education. The conference theme was “We are 

the ones we’ve been waiting for.” ESRL student 

coordinator Ann Thorne spoke with students 

about NOAA, about summer internships at 

ESRL, and about the importance of studying 

the planet. 

Published

ESRL scientists published more than 60 

papers in the last quarter, highlights below. 

More publications can be found at: http://

www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/publications/, http://

www.cdc.noaa.gov/pubs/ [PSD], http://www.

esrl.noaa.gov/csd/pubs/, and http://www.fsl.

noaa.gov/publications/ [GSD].

Alexandrov, MD, B Schmid, DD Turner, 

B Cairns, V Oinas, AA Lacis, SI Gutman, 

ER Westwater, A Smirnov, and J Eilers, 

2009, Columnar water vapor retrievals from 

multifilter rotating shadowband radiometer 

data, J Geophys Res, 114. ESRL GPS water 

vapor observations were used to evaluate 

the performance of the multifilter rotating 

shadowband radiometer and its ability to 

retrieve total column precipitable water vapor 

amounts for the validation of MODIS satellite 

water vapor products.

Compo, GP and PD Sardeshmukh, 2009, 

Oceanic influences on recent continental 

warming, Clim Dyn, 32. The recent worldwide 

land warming is largely a response to a 

worldwide warming of the oceans rather than 

a direct response to increasing greenhouse 

gases over land. The oceanic influence has 

occurred primarily by moistening and 

warming the air over land and increasing the 

downward longwave radiation at the surface.

Hoerling, M, A Kumar, J Eischeid, and B 

Jha, 2008, What is causing the variability in 

global mean land temperature? Geophys Res 

Lett, 35. Most of the observed variability of 

global mean land temperature during 1880-

2007 is caused by variations in global sea 

surface temperatures (SSTs). The variability 

in global SSTs have themselves resulted 

mostly from external radiative forcing due to 

greenhouse gas, aerosol, solar and volcanic 

variations, especially on multidecadal 

time scales. Natural variations internal 

to the Earth’s climate system have had a 

relatively small impact on the low frequency 

variations in global mean land temperature. 

It is therefore extremely unlikely that the 

recent trajectory of terrestrial warming 

Iraqi researchers Husam Hanna Habib (left) and Abdul Kareem 

Mohammad (right) inspect a microwave profiler at ESRL’s tower 

site in Erie, Colo. In the background: ESRL’s Dan Wolfe (left) and 

Randolph Ware (right), of Radiometrics Corp. 

10 Tony Tafoya/NOAA
can be overwhelmed (and become colder 

than normal) as a consequence of natural 

variability.

Hofman, DJ, JH Butler, PP Tans, 2009, 

A new look at atmospheric carbon dioxide, 

Atm Env, 43. This paper shows that the 

anthropogenic global CO2 growth rate is 

growing exponentially with a doubling time 

of 40 years closely tracking human population 

growth.

Hofmann, DJ and SA Montzka, 2009, 

Recovery of the ozone layer: the Ozone 

Depleting Gas Index, EOS Trans, 90. This is 

the first publication of an easily understood 

and robust index to track the decrease of 

ozone depleting gases in response to the 

Montreal Protocol. 

Lack, DA, JJ Corbett, T Onasch, B Lerner, 

P Massoli, PK Quinn, TS Bates, DS Covert, 

D Coffman, B Sierau, S Herndon, J Allan, T 

Baynard, E Lovejoy, AR Ravishankara, and E 

Williams, 2009, Particulate emissions from 

commercial shipping: Chemical, physical, and 

optical properties, J Geophys Res, 114. This 

study is the first to provide a global estimate 

of maritime shipping’s total contribution 

to air particle pollution based on direct 

measurements. Sixteen scientists from five 

different institutions used 14 instruments to 

observe 200 ships from around the world. 

The data collected provide information on 

ship pollutants that affect local air quality and 

the health of people living along coastlines.

Mercer, AE , MB Richman, HB Bluestein, 

and JM Brown, 2008, Statistical modeling of 

downslope windstorms in Boulder, Colorado, 

2008, Weather and Forecasting, 23. This paper 

studies the potential for improving windstorm 

forecasting with linear and nonlinear 

statistical modeling techniques. The research 

is important to understanding downslope 

windstorms, which often strike with little 

warning and produce widespread damage in 

and around Boulder, Colo. 

Michelson, SA and JW Bao, 2008, 

Sensitivity of low-level winds simulated by 

the WRF model in California’s Central Valley 

to uncertainties in the large-scale forcing and 

soil initialization, J Applied Met and Clim, 

47. This paper is the first to investigate the 

sensitivity of low-level winds simulated by 

the state-of-the-art Weather Research and 

Forecasting (WRF) Model in California’s 

Central Valley to model uncertainties. It 

reveals the fundamental issues in discerning 

the error sources in air-quality modeling over 

complex topography and provides vital clues 

about how to address them.

Mofor, LA and C Lu, 2008, Generalized 

moist potential vorticity and its application 

in the analysis of atmospheric flows, Prog Nat 

Sci, 19. In this paper, the generalized moist 

potential vorticity is derived to depict the 

moist effect on potential vorticity anomaly 

in the non-uniformly saturated atmosphere. 

This will help us better understand large-scale 

motions in the atmosphere and oceans.

Murphy, DM, 2009, Deliberate 

stratospheric aerosols, direct sunlight, and 

concentrating solar power, Env Sci Tech, 43. 

Please see p 6.

Schnell, RC, SJ Oltmans, RR Neely, MS 

Endres, JV Molenar and AB White 2009, 

Rapid photochemical production of ozone 

at high concentrations in a rural site during 

winter, Nature Geosci. Please see p 1. 

Solomon, S, G-K Plattner, R Knutti, and 

P Friedlingstein, 2009, Irreversible climate 

change due to carbon dioxide emissions, 

PNAS, 106. Please see p 1. 

Left: University of Colorado student Jerome Jackson 

(left) and Victor Hernandez, Director of the Student 

Outreach Retention Center for Equity office (right), 

during a Boulder Valley School District multicultural 

education conference.

Right: Russian scientists have installed an ESRL ceilometer on a drifting ice station in the Arctic Ocean. 

Far right: Last summer, ESRL’s Dan Wolfe and Rob 

Albee tested the device, which measures distance to 

cloud bottom.

Bill Bendel was a co-recipient of NOAA’s 

General Counsel Award, for his leadership 

installing Science On a Sphere® in the 

Smithsonian Sant Ocean Systems Gallery 

~ John Daniel and David Fahey shared 

a Technical Achievement Award from 

the Environmental Protection Agency 

with EPA’s Steve Andersen, for work on 

the importance of the Montreal Protocol 

in protecting climate ~ The American 

Geophysical Union has appointed Joost 

deGouw editor of the Journal of Geophysical 

Research Atmospheres~ Mike Hardesty

was elected to a three-year term on the 

American Meteorological Society Council, 

which governs AMS ~ Eric Hackathorn

was named one of Federal Computer Week’s 

2009 “Federal 100,” an award for those who 

made significant contributions to federal 

information technology. Hackathorn leads 

NOAA’s educational efforts in the online 

world SecondLife ~ A.R. Ravishankara, 

Director of ESRL’s Chemical Sciences 

Division, was the 2008 Centenary Lecturer 

at the Indian Institute of Science ~Susan 

Solomon was inducted into the National 

Women’s Hall of Fame, in recognition of her 

work on the Antarctic ozone hole and as 

co-chair of Working Group 1 of the Nobel 

Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on 

Climate Change (IPCC) ~ Deb Wilson and 

Henry Diaz won 2008 NOAA Distinguished 

Career Awards, Wilson for 25 years of 

administrative and budgetary excellence, and 

Diaz, now retired, for 33 years of work in 

climate research and monitoring ~ Twentyfive ESRL scientists received a NASA Group 

Achievement Award for the July 2007 TC4 

mission, on Tropical Composition, Cloud, 

and Climate Coupling ~ Seven ESRL 

researchers were finalists for the Governor’s 

Award for Research Impact, for their work 

on Climate Change in Colorado, A Synthesis 

to Support Water Resources Management 

and Adaptation. Authors were ESRL’s 

Andrea Ray, Joseph Barsugli, Kristen 

Averyt, Klaus Wolter, Martin Hoerling, 

Bradley Udall, Robert Webb, and Colorado 

State Climatologist Nolan Doesken. The 

Governor’s award was won by Bob Sievers, 

former director of CIRES, for his work 

developing inexpensive, inhalable, powder 

vaccines. 

Honored

11

Eric Hackathorne, the virtual version (left) and in real life (right).
Earth System Research Laboratory

325 Broadway

Boulder, CO 80305

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/

ESRL Quarterly editor: Katy Human 

Photographers: Will von Dauster and Barb DeLuisi

Other Contributors: Anatta, Debra Dailey-Fisher

Contact: katy.g.human@noaa.gov

www.esrl.noaa.gov/news/quarterly

ESRL Leadership 

Alexander MacDonald, Director

John Schneider, Deputy Director, Research

Donald Mock, Deputy Director, Administration

A.R. Ravishankara, Chemical Sciences Division Director

James Butler, Global Monitoring Division Director

Steven Koch, Global Systems Division Director

William Neff, Physical Sciences Division Director

At NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, we observe, understand, and predict the Earth system through research that 

advances NOAA’s environmental information and services, from minutes to millennia on global to local scales. ESRL’s partners are 

the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the Cooperative 

Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. 

ESRL’s Robin Webb and Roger Pulwarty traveled to India in January, at the request of government officials there seeking advice about 

establishing a drought early warning information system similar to the US National Integrated Drought Information System, NIDIS. 

Pulwarty and Webb helped develop NIDIS, 

which integrates drought risk, impacts, adaptation information, and expertise from several 

government agencies and research institutions

“The Indian officials wanted to talk with us 

about the organizational part of this, the infrastructure,” Pulwarty said. “They’ve got the 

scientific and technical capacity. They’re just 

trying to figure out how to make it all work 

together as an effective information system.” 

Three Indian researchers from the Department of Agriculture’s extension service and 

the Arid Lands Institute traveled to the United 

States last summer to talk with experts at 

ESRL and the US Geological Survey, and to 

attend a NIDIS workshop in Kansas on the 

national status of drought early warning systems. Pulwarty, Webb, and Chris Funk from 

the Geological Survey returned that visit in 

January, meeting with Indian officials at several levels of government, from the Meteorological Department and the National Institute 

of Agricultural Extension Management to the 

Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture. 

The visit was supported by the US Agency for 

International Development, USAID, which 

recently added drought risk management to 

its list of top risk management concerns. Famines have devastated India periodically, with 

both political and climate causes. A recent 

study uncovered a tight relationship between 

El Niño events and the failure of the Indian 

monsoon—which may help in forecasting 

droughts. Monsoon rains are critical for agriculture across India. 

Webb said his Indian colleagues face different 

challenges than he and Pulwarty dealt with 

when working to create a national drought 

information system out of parts scattered 

throughout government. In India, for example, department ministers seek funding from 

Parliament individually, instead of having a 

president or prime minister pitch a coordinated budget. That makes funding a new national 

system challenging. India also lacks a national 

rangeland policy, although rangeland 

management is a critical part of dealing with drought.

However, local governments 

across India already do a 

good job of collecting onthe-ground information 

about drought impacts and 

responses, Webb and Pulwarty 

said, and there is a solid understanding that any drought 

information system must have both social and 

scientific dimensions. 

USAID is also funding ESRL’s Marty Hoerling 

and Balaji Rajagopalan, from the University of 

Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research 

in Environmental Sciences, to continue their 

research studying the effect of climate change 

on drought and monsoons in India. 

ESRL scientists help India plan national drought network

India and Drought

Robin Webb (top) and Roger Pulwarty (below).

After President Bush signed the NIDIS Act 

into law in 2006, the agency took shape 

under a partnership between the Western 

States Governors Association and 

NOAA. NIDIS is hosted by ESRL 

and supported by the NOAA 

Climate Program Office. 

Webb is on the NIDIS 

science and implementation team, which is 

chaired by Pulwarty 

and comprised of representatives from more 

than 50 federal, state, 

and tribal agencies.

12