SCORCH at the AMS Annual Meeting (January 12-16, 2025)

If you happen to find yourself at the AMS annual meeting (January 12-16, 2025), come interact with SCORCH at these sessions! 

Authors with asterisks after their names represent SCORCH faculty members, students, advisory board members, or network partners. Note that SCORCH PI Dr. Kacey Clarice Ernst serves as Vice-Chair of the AMS Board on Environment and Health.

105th Annual Meeting, American Meteorological Society

105th Annual Meeting, American Meteorological Society (in SCORCH Events)

Sunday, January 12, 2025, 6:30PM - 8:30PM 

Adapting to Extreme Heat: A Structured Toolkit for Establishing Safe and Effective Cooling Centers (S39)

Authors: Royani Saha*, Julie Robinson*, & Mona Arora*

This session will describe key aspects of the structured toolkit co-developed by SCORCH and the Pima County Health Department to provide cooling center partners with best practices and recommendations for establishing effective cooling centers that meet health and safety standards for vulnerable populations. 

Assessing Heat Action Planning in Arizona Through Hierarchy of Controls and Socio-ecological Model Lens (S132)

Authors: Imran Mithu*, Paloma Beamer*, Maia Ingram*, & Mona Arora*

This session will highlight study findings that suggest the need for a comprehensive approach using multi-level interventions and cross-sectoral collaboration to address the public health challenges posed by extreme heat in Arizona. 

Monday, January 13, 2025, 3:00PM - 3:40PM 

Aerosol On the Stochasticity of Aerosol-Cloud Interactions within a Data-driven Framework (E12 - 17)

Authors: Xiangyu Li, Hailong Wang, T.C. Chakraborty, Armin Sorooshian*, Luke Ziemba, Christiane Voight, & K. Lee Thornhill

Aerosol-cloud interactions (ACI) are the source of the largest uncertainties for climate simulations. Among many challenges of understanding ACI, the question of whether ACI can be deterministically predicted has not been explicitly formulated or asked. Here we attempt to answer this question by predicting cloud droplet number concentration N_c from aerosol number concentration N_a and ambient conditions using a data-driven framework. 

Monday, January 13, 2025, 4:30PM-4:45PM

Overview of NASA’s Aerosol Cloud Meteorology Interactions over the Western Atlantic Experiment (ACTIVATE) (J4B.1)

Authors: Armin Sorooshian*, Richard A. Ferrare, Johnathan W. Hair, & Xubin Zeng

This presentation will highlight scientific and technological advances from the NASA Aerosol Cloud meTeorology Interactions oVer the western ATlantic Experiment (ACTIVATE) project that conducted 179 flights with two aircraft over the western North Atlantic Ocean to study aerosol-cloud-meteorology interactions.

Monday, January 13, 2025, 5:30PM - 5:45PM

Enhancing Heat Resilience in Southern Arizona through Codesign and Academic Public Health Partnerships (J4.5)

Authors: Mona Arora*, Imran Mithu*, Julie Robinson*, Fátima Luna*, Malini Roy*, & Ladd Keith*

This session will describe the recommendations and outcomes of the Southern Arizona Heat Planning Summit, highlight the collaborative approach adopted for the co-design of heat planning and response efforts, and introduce effective strategies and characteristics to enable effective multi-sectoral, academic-practice partnerships.

Tuesday, January 14, 2025, 8:30AM - 10:00AM

Panel on Climate, Environment, Health, and Early Warning: Advancing Actionable Climate Forecasts and Disease Modeling and Predictions (J5B)

Authors: Kacey Clarice Ernst* & Wassila Mamadou Thiaw

The panel will bring together experts on climate, environment, and health to discuss advances in climate-based health early warning systems. We begin by framing the conversation around climate and health by discussing the critical role of climate variability and change in shaping infectious and non-transmissible diseases dynamics and the imperative need to advance actionable climate and disease modeling and predictions followed by a discussion on recent advances in environmental modeling and the tailoring of predictions to respond to the needs of the heath sector. 

Tuesday, January 14, 2025, 5:00PM - 5:15PM

Does flooding increase the risk of mosquito-borne diseases? Evidence, gaps, methods, and implications for early warning. (8.3)

Authors: Kacey Clarice Ernst*, Mary Hayden, Ellen Santos, Pablo Reyes Castro, Ariel Belasen, Andrea Kibel, Maricela Montalvo Corral, Samuel Watts, & Jenna Coalson

Climate change is leading to heavier precipitation, more frequent hurricanes, and rising sea levels, all of which contribute to increasing flooding events across the globe. Flooding has the potential to increase the aquatic habitats required for the development of immature mosquitoes. The links between flooding and mosquito-borne disease activity are developing but much remains to be discovered. Authors will discuss current mechanisms and mitigating factors that modify the risk of mosquito-borne illnesses post-flooding; methodologies that can be employed to explore this relationship including a discussion of relevant time lags, weather input variables, model selection, and the logistics of developing these studies during an emerging weather event; the relevance to early warning systems and climate change projectionse; and analyses that examined the connection between aggregate level dengue data and flooding events across Mexico.

Wednesday, January 15 2025, 8:45AM - 9:00AM 

Evaluating Atmospheric Stability and Marine Boundary Layer Cloud Relationships Over the Western North Atlantic on Multiple Temporal Scales (9B.2)

Authors: Lauren Cutler, Annalisa Minke, Michael A Brunke, Xubin Zeng, & Armin Sorooshian*

Marine boundary layer clouds play an important role in the global radiation budget and are still a major source of uncertainty within global climate models (GCMs). There are well known stability parameters (i.e. lower tropospheric stability (LTS), and estimated inversion strength (EIS)) that are used to predict seasonal low cloud amount. These parameters have played an important role in predicting low level clouds in GCMs (i.e. within cloud parameterizations in early versions of GCMs and fine tuning the low-level clouds in the model). This study evaluates the performance of LTS and EIS as well as estimated cloud-top entrainment index (ECTEI), and cold-air outbreak index (CAO) on different temporal scales (10-minute, daily, and monthly) using observational field campaign data, reanalysis, and GCM output.

Wednesday, January 15, 2025, 3:00PM - 4:30PM 

Connecting Climate, Insect Vector and Electronic Health Record Data for Surveillance of Vector-Borne Diseases: Concept Development

Authors: Titus Schleyer, Luis Chaves, Gabriel Michael Filipelli, Kacey Clarice Ernst*, A. Desiree LaBeaud, Sonia Angell, & Daniel Johnson

Climate change acts as a threat multiplier, intensifying extreme weather, rendering ecosystems more vulnerable and deepening socioeconomic impacts within human communities. Recognizing the interconnectedness of climate and health is essential for developing and enhancing health resilience in the face of these changes. While we can track vector-borne diseases (VBDs) using electronic health record (EHR) data, there is a gap in integrating EHR data with climatic and VBD surveillance data, both from a public health and clinical perspective. We therefore need to begin developing technical approaches that integrate data and processes into comprehensive VBD surveillance systems.

Thursday, January 16, 2025, 3:00PM - 4:30PM 

Integrated Analysis of Airborne In-situ Cloud and Aerosol Microphysics Data during the 2022 Chemistry in the Arctic: Clouds, Halogens, and Aerosols (CHACHA) Field Campaign (935)

Authors: Sara Sky Lombardo, Sara M. Lance, Karri A. Pratt, Paul B. Shepson, Jose D. Fuentes, William R. Simpson, Sarah Woods, Daun Jeong, Natasha Garner, Andrea F. Corral, Peter Peterson, Carol Costanza, Katja Bigge, Tim Starn, Brian Stim, & Armin Sorooshian*

Observations from the University of Wyoming King Air are evaluated closely to assess the ambient conditions relevant to the Arctic boundary layer during flights targeting clouds emanating from open leads in the Arctic sea ice. Aerosol microphysics data from instruments including a Condensation Particle Counters (CPC), Portable Optical Particle Spectrometer (POPS), and Passive Cavity Aerosol Spectrometer Probe (PCASP) and cloud microphysics data from a Cloud Droplet Probe (CDP) and Two-Dimensional Stereo (2D-S) probe are used. In addition, instruments on the aircraft recorded geo-location and pressure altitude data. Dropsonde and satellite data, to assess the 3-D environment sampled during these flights, were obtained in preparation for future modeling studies. These results will provide insights in the aerosol and cloud microphysics in the understudied and changing Arctic troposphere. Diagnostic measurements from the Counterflow Virtual Impactor (CVI) and Particle into Liquid Sampler (PILS) are further used to evaluate the sampling conditions under which each of the samples were obtained.