The Air Resources Laboratory’s (ARL) mission is to improve the ability of the Nation to protect human and ecosystem health and to support a vibrant economy through advanced atmospheric sciences and technologies.

HYSPLIT continues to be one of the most extensively used atmospheric transport and dispersion models in the atmospheric sciences community. A common application is a back trajectory analysis to determine the origin of air masses and establish source-receptor relationships.

ARL’s atmospheric transport and dispersion research provides critical modeling and observation data to understand how, where, and when chemicals and materials are dispersed through the atmosphere.

ARL scientists perform activities to understand the main processes that drive the transport and dispersion of harmful substances in the atmosphere, to improve the quality of our modeling tools, and to assess the uncertainties and applicability of those tools.

Jan 13, 2025 · These findings suggest that a traditional “big-leaf” approach for emission/deposition may not be appropriate to model the dynamic behavior of ammonia within a forest ecosystem, re-emphasizing the potential importance of multilayer canopy models for use in large-scale atmospheric models.

The Atmospheric Tracer Technology employed by the Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) Field Research Division (FRD), involves a small amount of a stable, non-toxic, invisible, odorless, and easily detectable substance (known as a tracer) that is released into the air.

Developed and maintained by ARL, HYSPLIT is the core engine of ARL’s transport-dispersion modeling activities and it is one of the most widely used models for atmospheric trajectory and dispersion calculations in the US and internationally.

This database permits the atmospheric transport modeling community to conduct various evaluation and sensitivity studies and compare model results with each other on a common basis. Users of the database are encouraged to share any additional analysis software that they develop and prepare and submit additional experimental data to the archive.

2012 – 2020: Research Scientist & Aircraft Program Director, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Maryland College Park, College Park, MD

Scientists at ARL perform research in surface-atmosphere exchange to better understand how these processes influence the behavior of the atmosphere and affect our daily lives through the weather and climate we experience and the air we breathe.