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Elizabeth (Betsy) C. Weatherhead authored and/or contributed to the following articles/publications.
For Better Integration, Improve the Forecast
The article discusses the significance of accurate solar irradiance forecasts that will enable power grid operators to make better decisions in scheduling on the optimal mix of power generation sources. It presents an analysis of the important time scales for operation of the power grid. It also mentions the use of the Rapid Update Cycle (RUC) w...
Remote Sensing in the Arctic with Unmanned Aircraft: Helping Scientists to Achieve Their Goals
– With the rapid changes occurring in the Arctic, scientists are looking for new tools to fill data gaps and assist with their understanding of Arctic climate processes. While satellites and manned aircraft have been the primary platforms for remote sensing, data gaps still exist. Unmanned aircraft have potential to help fill those gaps because...
We report on the first multi-year springtime measurements of PAN in the free troposphere over the U.S. Pacific Northwest. The measurements were made at the summit of Mount Bachelor (43.979°N, 121.687°W; 2.7 km ASL) by gas chromatography with electron capture detector during spring 2008, 2009, and 2010. This dataset provides an observational esti...
The renewable energy communities are rapidly increasing the amount of installations for solar renewable energy with an increase of at least 50% each year since 2003. Even more solar installations are planned for the coming years. As the amount of energy derived from the sun increases, the demand for a more quantitative understanding of solar ren...
Automation Assistance in Gathering and Analyzing Images of Arctic Ice Seals
With the decrease in Arctic sea ice extent and the changes in ice characteristics, there is an immediate concern for the effects of these changes on the ecosystems of the Arctic. In the last three years, innovative approaches have been applied to address this concern. Unmanned aircraft, in addition to manned aircraft, are being flown in the Ar...
Renewable Energy: New Challenges and New Partnerships
Geophysical scientists will be key players in determining the success of renewable energy by assisting in the evaluation of the costs of renewables in an unbiased manner, improving forecast models so renewable sources can be used optimally and advising on siting to assure efficient renewable power generation in the future. The initial inve...
Sea ice characteristics and ice seal behavior: new results from unmanned aircraft data
In spring 2009, NOAA together with U. Colorado and U. Alaska embarked on a campaign to measure sea ice, ocean and ice seals in the Bering Sea. The effort is the first attempt to use unmanned aircraft to monitor ice, water and seals in remote areas without putting human pilots at risk. The analysis of the data collected on that mission will be pr...
NOAA's unmanned aircraft program: recent accomplishments and future plans
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Program is evaluating the potential benefit that UAS platforms and sensors can provide to the NOAA mission by meeting critical or unique observational requirements that are currently not met by other observing platforms. The NOAA UAS Program has supported ...
Comparison between ARW and NMM objective verification scores
The Lidar Altimeter elevation profiles from the Arctic MUSCOX (MUltiSensor Cryospheric Observation eXperiment) project are presented and compared against other techniques for digital elevation mapping of the supraglacial melt lake region in the vicinity of the Jacobshavn Glacier. The hypsography of the sampled region will be discussed, and an es...
Designing the Climate Observing System of the Future
Climate observations are needed to address a large range of important societal issues including sea level rise, droughts, floods, extreme heat events, food security, and freshwater availability in the coming decades. Past, targeted investments in specific climate questions have resulted in tremendous improvements in issues important to human hea...
Institutions Earth System Research Laboratory - ESRL National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - NOAA
U.S. CH4 emissions from oil and gas production: Have recent large increases been detected?
Recent studies have proposed significant increases in CH4 emissions possibly from oil and gas (O&G) production, especially for the U.S. where O&G production has reached historically high levels over the past decade. In this study, we show that an ensemble of time-dependent atmospheric inversions constrained by calibrated atmospheric observations...
Institutions Earth System Research Laboratory - ESRL National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - NOAA
Spatial Coverage of Monitoring Networks: A Climate Observing System Simulation Experiment
Observing systems consisting of a finite number of in situ monitoring stations can provide high-quality measurements with the ability to quality assure both the instruments and the data but offer limited information over larger geographic areas. This paper quantifies the spatial coverage represented by a finite set of monitoring stations by usin...
Institutions Earth System Research Laboratory - ESRL National Center for Atmospheric Research - NCAR National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - NOAA
Sensors on satellites provide unprecedented understanding of the Earth's climate system by measuring incoming solar radiation, as well as both passive and active observations of the entire Earth with outstanding spatial and temporal coverage. A common challenge with satellite observations is to quantify their ability to provide well-calibrated, ...
Institutions Earth System Research Laboratory - ESRL National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - NOAA
Planning the Climate Observing Systems of the Future
Climate change is well understood to be one of the major risks to modern society as well as one of the greatest science challenges of this century (IPCC, 2013, USGCRP, 2014). Yet we lack an observing system specifically designed to address this joint societal/scientific challenge of climate change (NRC, 2007; Trenberth et al., 2013; Dowell et a...