Congratulations to Henrique Barbosa, GESTAR II member and Associate Professor, UMBC Physics Department! The Department of Energy recently announced $4.7 million in funding for select Research Development and Partnership Pilots (RDPP) research grants. Dr. Barbosa is the PI of the grant "Using LASSO to bridge the gap between model and observations and to learn about atmospheric convection," one of the 35 grants selected. Xiaowen Li, Morgan State University (MSU), is the Co-I and Dr. Ricardo Sakai, Howard University (HU), is the Collaborator. Dr. Li also is a Senior Research Scientist with MSU in Code 612/GSFC and Chief Scientist with GESTAR II.
According to the DOE's announcement, "Projects were chosen by competitive merit review under the DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement, "Research Development and Partnership Pilot (RDPP)," sponsored by the Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program within the Department's Office of Science."
For background on LASSO, or Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) ARM Symbiotic Simulation and Observation, and its role in the proposed study, Dr. Barbosa explains that, "To bridge the gap between observations and models, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program of the Department of Energy (DoE) has recently developed LASSO (...). LASSO bundles LES model outputs with ARM observations of real clouds, providing a powerful tool to understand cloud processes in the atmosphere."
Further, this RDPP project aims to foster collaborations with national science labs and minority-serving institutions (MSIs). According to Dr. Barbosa, "... the first objective of this project is to develop a new partnership among the proposing institutions, allowing the team to share expertise and collaborate on topics which they have been pursuing independently. We then want to establish a collaboration with the LASSO team at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to achieve our second objective, which is to participate in outreach and training activities offered by the Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division (EESSD), such as the LASSO Tutorial in May 2021. Pursuing these two objectives will enable our team to engage in EESSD relevant research using ARM data and models. This will lead to the fulfillment of our third objective, which is to foster atmospheric science research and training capacity at our minority-serving institutions."
For more information on this grant and related activities, contact Dr. Barbosa at hbarbosa@umbc.edu.