A paper published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) describes a DOE user facility activity to improve process-level understanding of the atmosphere. Zhijin Li, a JIFRSSE researcher, is the university principal investigator for the DOE Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Symbiotic Simulation and Observation (LASSO) activity. LASSO is intended to help bridge the gap between observations and large-scale models. By combining observations with LES modeling, LASSO “data bundles” allow researchers to compare routine, high-resolution simulations with what happened over a specific site on a given date. LASSO’s first scenario of focus was shallow convection over the DOE ARM user facility’s Southern Great Plains atmospheric observatory in Oklahoma.

The BAMS article documents the shallow convection scenario and serves as the foundational paper for LASSO. Zhijin Li and Xiaoping Cheng, a JIFRESSE visiting professor, co-authored the paper with collaborators from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Brookhaven and Oak Ridge national laboratories;

Read the article on the BAMS website. https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0065.1

To learn more, go to the LASSO page on the ARM web page. https://www.arm.gov/capabilities/modeling/lasso