ESI scientists and graduate students present at APOLO and AGU conferences

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 14:57:05 -0500
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ESI members participated in two conferences this past fall: the Advancements in Polarimetric Observations (APOLO) in Kyoto, Japan, from November 18 -22, 2024 and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington, DC from December 8 -13, 2024.

UMBC ATPH graduate students Noah Sienkiewicz, Rachel Smith, Nirandi Jayasinghe, and Greema Regmi presented at APOLO and the latter three also at AGU. Mr. Sienkiewicz showed the latest results in the calibration of HARP2, and Ms. Smith discussed a new cloud property retrieval technique applied to HARP2 data. Ms. Jayasinghe presented research on the interactions between aerosols and clouds, and Ms. Regmi used two different instruments, a polarimeter and a lidar, to tease out finer details about aerosol-shaped properties.

Dr. Brent McBride, research scientist at ESI, co-convened a special interdisciplinary session on the science of the NASA PACE mission at AGU, alongside Dr. Susanne Craig (616/UMBC/GESTAR II), Skye Caplan (616/GSFC), and Dr. Bastiaan van Diedenhoven (SRON) on December 10, 2024. This session focused on current research in clouds, aerosols, land, ocean, modeling efforts, and algorithm development in support of PACE.

In this session, ESI scientists Dr. Anin Puthukkudy presented global HARP2 aerosol retrievals and Dr. Xiaoguang Xu discussed how to use HARP2 data to differentiate ice from liquid water clouds. ESI project scientist Dr. Lorraine Remer speculated on the future of aerosol remote sensing, Dr. McBride showed how PACE can be used to study hurricane properties, and ESI director Dr. J. Vanderlei Martins proposed a new method for retrieving aerosol radiative forcing from HARP2 multi-angle data.

Visit us at the ESI hallway on the third floor of the UMBC Physics building to learn more about HARP2, PACE, and our current research directions.

Photo, left to right: UMBC ATPH graduate students Nirandi Jayasinghe and Rachel Smith, ESI director Dr. J. Vanderlei Martins, and UMBC ATPH graduate students Greema Regmi and Hannah Seppala stand next to a woman in traditional kimono attire at the APOLO conference in Kyoto, Japan. (Photo credit: R. Smith/ESI)