Ryan Neely

Dr. Ryan R. Neely III (Lecturer of Observational Atmospheric Science in the National Centre for Atmospheric  Science (NCAS) and the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, UK) visit ACOM from August 18, 2015 to September 5, 2015. Previous to his post in Leeds, Dr. Neely was and ASP post-doctoral fellow. He returned to NCAR this summer to work with Dr. Michael Mills, Dr. Anja Schmidt (also from the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds) and the larger WACCM group to finalize the development of the prognostic stratospheric aerosol module in CESM.  Specifically, Dr. Neely developed a sulfur dioxide emission database from 1850 to 1977. As this database covers the pre-satelitte observation period, gathering the needed information was difficult and Dr. Neely needed to draw from a wide array of historical information. This included evidence from the latest ice core studies (Neely is pictured below at the NSF funded observatory at Summit, Greenland in June, 2015 and is about 500m from the site of one the ice cores utilized in his work at NCAR), aerosol optical depth measurements made from halos around the sun (known as Bishop’s rings) and first-hand accounts.