2023 Program Topics

Thank you to the Technical Program Committee and presenters of the 2023 Meteorology and Climate - Modeling for Air Quality Conference! The program topics for the year were developed by our wonderful technical program committee and they selected an array of presentations to showcase within each session. Below are the session descriptions with presenters listed. The program schedule is available here.

MAC-MAQ 2023 Program PDF

2023 Program Topics and Descriptions

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Keynote: Linking Data with Decision-Making for Air Quality

Keynote Speaker: Tracey Holloway, University of Wisconsin--Madison, Professor
Environmental managers have long relied on atmospheric models and in situ measurements to support decision-making under the Clean Air Act. Today an even wider audience of policy, planning, and advocacy organizations are interested in air quality data to support climate action, environmental justice, emergency response, and other decision needs. By collaborating with these user communities, atmospheric scientists can expand the impact of existing knowledge, data, and tools. Growing the impact of science is the core mission of the NASA Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team, a major science applications and engagement effort over the past 10 years. Lessons learned from leading this NASA team will be discussed, and extended to broader applications of atmospheric models for applied problem-solving. Atmospheric models play an important role interpreting satellite data, connecting emissions and impacts, and answering “what if?” questions relevant to policy and planning. Traditional scientific frameworks are evolving to better support engagement and to expand the benefits of science to new issues and communities. Still, challenges remain, especially for early-career scientists balancing academic milestones with “real-world” engagement and societal impact.

Keynote: Pathways to advance wildfire smoke predictions

Keynote Speaker: Pablo Saide, UCLA, Assistant Professor
Smoke from biomass burning can generate a variety of impacts, including visibility issues, negative health effects on population, and meteorology and climate change effects. Air quality models can be used to predict smoke and its impacts; however, they can be highly uncertain. This presentation will show recent work identifying some of the existing gaps affecting predictions including topics of smoke emissions, vertical distribution, and aging. Observational evidence from ground-based networks, satellite retrievals and airborne field campaign data are heavily used, including the development of new derived products, and evaluation of novel observations. Potential pathways for model improvement will be shown and discussed.

Composition and Operational Forecasting from Daily to Seasonal Scales

Co-Chairs: Yang Zhang & Daniel Tong
This session invites submissions on producing atmospheric composition forecasting from daily to sub-seasonal to seasonal scales. This includes development and implementation of both research and operational deterministic air quality forecasting systems, ensemble approaches for probabilistic air quality forecasting, chemical data assimilation, bias correction, machine-learning and other techniques to improve initialization, emission, physical and chemical processes, and post-processing of air quality forecasting systems to improve forecasting skill and decision-making support.

Session Speakers:

Ravan Ahmadov, NOAA/GSL
Cesunica Ivey, University of California, Berkeley
Arthur Mizzi, NASA Ames Research Center, NOAA Chemical Systems Laboratory, and University of Colorado at Boulder Mechanical Engineering
Gabi Pfister, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
Ivanka Stajner, NOAA CEP EMC (Invited Speaker)
Craig Stroud, Environment and Climate Change Canada (Invited Speaker)
Chien Wang, LAERO, CNRS/UPS

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Breakthrough Innovations in Atmospheric & Air Quality Modeling

Co-Chairs: Siyuan Wang and Sebastian Eastham
As new challenges emerge in air quality modeling and forecasting, innovative techniques offer exciting opportunities to advance our understanding of the complex interactions between air quality, meteorology, and the climate system. Meanwhile we are facing a growing need to provide tools which can rapidly and reliably inform both the public and policy makers of the ways in which air quality might change, responding to questions of environmental justice and compounding environmental stressors. This session focuses on innovative techniques in atmospheric and air quality modeling, such as trustworthy artificial intelligence/machine learning, physics-infused machine learning, new approaches to model-data fusion, GPU-accelerated computing, and cloud computing.

Session Speakers:

Kiran Alapaty, US EPA
Cesunica Ivey, University of California Berkeley
Makoto Kelp, Harvard University (Invited Speaker)
Marcela Loria-Salazar, School of Meteorology, University of Oklahoma
Domingo Muñoz-Esparza, National Center for Atmospheric Research (Invited Speaker)
Obin Sturm, University of Southern California

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M3: Merging Measurements & Models

Co-Chairs: Brad Pierce and Carl Malings
Measurements provide real-world data to validate and constrain models, while models offer a framework for situating often sparse or intermittent measurements within a broader context. This session highlights work integrating measurements and models for physical and chemical processes in the atmosphere as they relate to air quality. A range of measurement types are considered, including in-situ and remote sensing measurements from surface, airborne, and satellite platforms. A variety of methods for measurement integration are also considered, including data assimilation, data fusion (including machine learning approaches), and use of measurements for model evaluation and validation.

Session Speakers:

Haitong Sun, University of Cambridge
David Fillmore, National Center for Atmospheric Research (Invited Speaker)
Kazuyuki Miyazaki, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Invited Speaker)
Sean Raffuse, UC Davis Air Quality Research Center
Jonathan Wynn Smith, NOAA/GFDL
Beiming Tang, University of Iowa (Invited Speaker)
Yuyan Cui, California Air Resources Board

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Meteorology-Chemistry Coupling, Feedbacks, and Interactions

Co-Chairs: Heather Holmes and Maryam Abdi-Oskouei
In this session, we invite submissions from the latest observational and modeling studies with the focus on advancing our understanding of meteorology and atmospheric chemistry as a coupled system. Relevant topics include but are not limited to: (1) Coupled meteorology and chemistry feedbacks across scales (e.g., land-atmosphere coupling, PBL mixing, cloud microphysics, dynamics, etc.), (2) Studies designed to investigate meteorology and air quality interactions across multiple pollutant species (e.g., aerosols and reactive gases), (3) Biogenic emissions and their impacts on regional and global air quality, (4) Combined effects of meteorology and chemistry and their associated broader societal impact (e.g., health burden, environmental justice, etc.).

Session Speakers:

Meiyun Lin, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Invited Speaker)
Allison Steiner, University of Michigan (Invited Speaker)
Njie Teeda, Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria
Qindan Zhu. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Modeling of Processes Across Multiple Scales

Co-Chairs: Louisa Emmons and Petra Klein
The linkages between the atmosphere's constituents and meteorology are dependent on the level of knowledge and methodology used to represent chemical and physical processes within the models. These processes are sometimes scale-dependent, with different scales necessitating different approaches. They may also be scale independent, applicable to all resolutions and modeling domains. In this session, we focus on new modeling systems and process representations that span all scales of atmospheric modeling. A particular focus is on fundamental processes - those which have a key influence on the predicted state of the atmosphere, yet may be addressed through novel process representation.

Session Speakers:

Yang Li, Baylor University (Invited Speaker)
Joao Teixeira, JPL/Caltech and UCLA
Jordi Vilà-Guerau de Arellano, Wageningen University (Invited Speaker)
Chi-Tsan Wang, George Mason University

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Unique/Extreme Events and their Impacts on Meteorology and Air Quality

Co-Chairs: Susan O'Neill and Karin Ardon-Dryer
Unique or extreme events such as wildfires, stratospheric ozone intrusions, dust storms, cold air pools, and pandemics can have notable and sometimes dramatic impacts on meteorology and air quality. Further, while typically episodic and unique in nature, climatological projections have them occurring more frequently and the enormity of their impact, spatially, temporally, and in terms of creating hazardous conditions, affect millions of lives. In this session we invite abstracts that probe the underlying physics and chemistry of extreme events with the goal of understanding their impact on air quality and meteorology. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, recent high-impact wildfires, pandemics, and other notable events such as dust storms, stratospheric ozone intrusions, and cold air pools.

Session Speakers:

Peter Colarco, NASA GSFC
Jenny Hand, Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, Colorado State University (Invited Speaker)
Andrew Langford, NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory
Sarah Lu, JCSDA & UAlbany
Adam Kochanski, San Jose State University
Tsengel Nergui, Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium
Holly Oldroyd, University of California, Davis
Dave Peterson, Naval Research Laboratory (Invited Speaker)

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