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Abstract The COVID‐19 pandemic caused an abrupt change in educational programs worldwide, including workforce development education in community colleges. Given the hands‐on requirements of these programs, considerations for changes included if and how instructors and students could maintain academic continuity during the pandemic. This article focuses on aviation maintenance technology schools (AMTS) as a case study to understand how programs that rely heavily on hands‐on learning responded to COVID‐19 significant disruption to education. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) must approve educational training for aviation maintenance careers, and the FAA requires specific hands‐on activities in the curriculum. Of the 182 AMTS in the United States, 143 are located within community colleges. We conducted 43 interviews with AMTS students, administrators, and instructors from 18 different community colleges. Following content analysis of the interviews, the authors identified six findings related to how these programs responded to the pandemic, with special attention to maintaining academic stability. The article advocates for integrating digital learning tools (DLT) to create resilient educational programs when disruptions occur. These tools allow for students to continue to asynchronously practice the procedures and familiarize themselves with the materials needed for projects, provide students immediate feedback on their learning, and save schools money on expensive resources when students require extra practice on certain skills and processes. The application of these tools is relevant beyond the pandemic, helping students in many scenarios succeed in the face of natural disasters, family obligations, and the need for extra learning resources. 

In March 2020, students across the country experienced disruptions to their learning due to the COVID-19 crisis. Aviation Maintenance Technology Schools (AMTS) were no exception. These schools relied heavily on hands-on learning to train the next generation of aircraft maintenance technicians, but, for varying periods, students were unable to attend in-person classes and complete hands-on projects. Schools could delay learning until they could resume in-person classes, or they could switch to remote lectures and complete required projects once they returned in-person. Through a resilience engineering framework, this research explores AMTS’ responses to the crisis and the effect both disruption and institutional response had on student learning. The research team conducted 43 semi-structured interviews with administrators, instructors, and students at AMTS nationally. During these interviews, participants shared their personal and their Part 147 schools’ responses to the pandemic. Content analysis revealed that schools were under-prepared for any long-term disruption to their programs. Student learning suffered as a result. We discuss our research in relation to the effect on academic continuity and identify some ways which help mitigate disruptions. 

Abstract One of the most intense air mass transformations on Earth happens when cold air flows from frozen surfaces to much warmer open water in cold-air outbreaks (CAOs), a process captured beautifully in satellite imagery. Despite the ubiquity of the CAO cloud regime over high-latitude oceans, we have a rather poor understanding of its properties, its role in energy and water cycles, and its treatment in weather and climate models. The Cold-Air Outbreaks in the Marine Boundary Layer Experiment (COMBLE) was conducted to better understand this regime and its representation in models. COMBLE aimed to examine the relations between surface fluxes, boundary layer structure, aerosol, cloud, and precipitation properties, and mesoscale circulations in marine CAOs. Processes affecting these properties largely fall in a range of scales where boundary layer processes, convection, and precipitation are tightly coupled, which makes accurate representation of the CAO cloud regime in numerical weather prediction and global climate models most challenging. COMBLE deployed an Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Mobile Facility at a coastal site in northern Scandinavia (69°N), with additional instruments on Bear Island (75°N), from December 2019 to May 2020. CAO conditions were experienced 19% (21%) of the time at the main site (on Bear Island). A comprehensive suite of continuous in situ and remote sensing observations of atmospheric conditions, clouds, precipitation, and aerosol were collected. Because of the clouds’ well-defined origin, their shallow depth, and the broad range of observed temperature and aerosol concentrations, the COMBLE dataset provides a powerful modeling testbed for improving the representation of mixed-phase cloud processes in large-eddy simulations and large-scale models. 

Abstract A multi-agency succession of field campaigns was conducted in southeastern Texas during July 2021 through October 2022 to study the complex interactions of aerosols, clouds and air pollution in the coastal urban environment. As part of the Tracking Aerosol Convection interactions Experiment (TRACER), the TRACER- Air Quality (TAQ) campaign the Experiment of Sea Breeze Convection, Aerosols, Precipitation and Environment (ESCAPE) and the Convective Cloud Urban Boundary Layer Experiment (CUBE), a combination of ground-based supersites and mobile laboratories, shipborne measurements and aircraft-based instrumentation were deployed. These diverse platforms collected high-resolution data to characterize the aerosol microphysics and chemistry, cloud and precipitation micro- and macro-physical properties, environmental thermodynamics and air quality-relevant constituents that are being used in follow-on analysis and modeling activities. We present the overall deployment setups, a summary of the campaign conditions and a sampling of early research results related to: (a) aerosol precursors in the urban environment, (b) influences of local meteorology on air pollution, (c) detailed observations of the sea breeze circulation, (d) retrieved supersaturation in convective updrafts, (e) characterizing the convective updraft lifecycle, (f) variability in lightning characteristics of convective storms and (g) urban influences on surface energy fluxes. The work concludes with discussion of future research activities highlighted by the TRACER model-intercomparison project to explore the representation of aerosol-convective interactions in high-resolution simulations. 

Intrusions of warm, moist air into the Arctic during winter have emerged as important contributors to Arctic surface warming. Previous studies indicate that temperature, moisture, and hydrometeor enhancements during intrusions all make contributions to surface warming via emission of radiation down to the surface. Here, datasets from instrumentation at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement User Facility in Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow) for the six months from November through April for the six winter seasons of 2013/14–2018/19 were used to quantify the atmospheric state. These datasets subsequently served as inputs to compute surface downwelling longwave irradiances via radiative transfer computations at 1-min intervals with different combinations of constituents over the six winter seasons. The computed six winter average irradiance with all constituents included was 205.0 W m⁻², close to the average measured irradiance of 206.7 W m⁻², a difference of −0.8%. During this period, water vapor was the most important contributor to the irradiance. The computed average irradiance with dry gas was 71.9 W m⁻². Separately adding water vapor, liquid, or ice to the dry atmosphere led to average increases of 2.4, 1.8, and 1.6 times the dry atmosphere irradiance, respectively. During the analysis period, 15 episodes of warm, moist air intrusions were identified. During the intrusions, individual contributions from elevated temperature, water vapor, liquid water, and ice water were found to be comparable to each other. These findings indicate that all properties of the atmospheric state must be known in order to quantify the radiation coming down to the Arctic surface during winter.