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About the High-Resolution Forecast Prototype Project
Deterministic forecasting models have always played a role in episodic air quality forecasts and have recently become integral to issuing real-time forecasts for health alerts and emergency response in the event of an accident or terrorist attack. A high-resolution weather model is necessary to adequately represent the small-scale phenomena that are significant to predicting dispersion of pollutants in a region such as the Los Angeles Basin. In addition to transport by the regional scale winds, the forecast must accurately capture the sea and land breeze circulation and the convectively driven upslope circulation in the surrounding mountains. The accuracy of fine-scale, limited-area forecast models depends, among other factors, on the quality of boundary and initial conditions supplied to the model, and on the number, distribution, and quality of atmospheric observations, and the methods used to analyze them. The focus of our research at The Aerospace Corporation is on improving fine-scale, real-time weather predictions over the Los Angeles Basin through the optimal assimilation of space-based and local weather observations. The widely used weather prediction model, MM5, is configured to run with the three-dimensional data assimilation analysis (3DVar) software to automatically generate pseudo-operational daily weather forecasts at 5-kilometer resolution over the LA Basin. The domain matches that used by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) for forecasting air quality. The system assimilates observational data obtained from local sources and the worldwide observational database of the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) in Omaha, Nebraska. The AFWA data includes surface and rawinsonde observations; aircraft reports (AIREP); cloud-drift winds from geostationary satellites; and precipitable water and surface wind speed over oceans from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I). Additional data are pulled from servers of the surface networks of the South Coast Air Quality Management District of California (SCAQMD) and the Remote Automated Weather Stations (RAWS) of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), as well as the boundary layer profiler (BLP) network of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL). Additional bouy data are pulled from the National Buoy Data Center. Verification software was developed to compare MM5 output to observations. A selected subset of model output and verification plots are posted daily to this Web site. The Meteorological Satellite Systems office within The Aerospace Corporation runs an Environmental Applications Center (EAC) to facilitate environmental satellite data exploitation. Our office has a long history of projects involving Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) data. Aerospace has data assimilation and weather modeling expertise, and an office in Omaha collocated with the AFWA to help implement these technologies operationally. The Meteorological Satellite Systems office also supports NASA through prototyping the use of Earth Observing System (EOS) aqua and terra data in operational weather applications. Aerospace is heavily involved in the National Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). Because NPOESS is a joint NOAA/NASA/Defense Department program, managed by NOAA, The Aerospace Corporation's Meteorological Satellite Systems office's work in environmental data exploitation has broadened beyond military weather applications to include civilian interests such as air quality. Papers Presented American Meteorological Sociey, Air Quality Conference, April 2005 U.S. Weather Research Program Workshop, December 2003 AMWA 2003 |