The NOAA Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) has contributed to advancing boundary layer and climate research for over 75 years. Before the formation of NOAA in 1970, ARL was part of the Environmental Science Services Administration (ESSA) and the US Weather Bureau, with offices geographically distributed across the nation to address global, regional, and local scientific challenges of a changing environment. ARL was originally created to study atmospheric effects of nuclear weapons tests as the Special Projects Section of the Weather Bureau under the leadership of Lester Machta. These early atmospheric transport studies were the foundation of the laboratory’s boundary layer research programs, which evolved over the decades to include atmospheric measurements for emergency response applications, development of dispersion modeling capabilities, establishment of multiple mesonets, monitoring of global acid deposition (e.g. acid rain), and observations of climate variables. Seminal atmospheric research at ARL has produced the Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT) model, which was developed by ARL scientists in 1998 and is widely used internationally, and the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), a sustained network of approximately 140 climate monitoring stations which provides air temperature, precipitation, and soil moisture data across different landscapes. In recognition of ARL’s 75th anniversary, presentations are encouraged that reflect on the innovative contributions of weather and climate research not only from ARL and its federal and academic collaborators, both past and present, but also future directions for boundary layer research that build on lessons learned from past decades of pioneering work may also be presented.

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