ARL Weekly News – December 1, 2017

HQ

Alice Crawford the University of Maryland Atmospheric and Oceanic Science departmental seminar on Thursday, 30 November. Her talk was titled HYSPLIT: Modeling the transport and dispersion of atmospheric tracers.

At the request of the Washington VAAC (volcanic ash advisory center), Alice Crawford provided HYSPLIT runs simulating the eruption of Agung volcano in Bali. The model output was used to support the Darwin VAAC which is responsible for the area in which Agung resides.

Youhua Tang, Mariusz Pagowski, Tianfeng Chai, Li Pan, Pius Lee, Barry Baker, Rajesh Kumar, Luca Delle Monache, Daniel Tong, and Hyun-Cheol Kim, submitted a case study to Geoscientific Model Development “Aerosol Data Assimilation with the Community Multi-Scale Air Quality Model over the Contiguous United States using 3D-Var and Optimal Interpolation Methods.” This paper applied a 3D-var data assimilation method (GSI) to adjust the aerosol initial condition of the Community Multi-Scale Air Quality Model (CMAQ) with surface PM2.5 monitoring and satellite aerosol optical depth data. We evaluated this 3D-var method with an existing optimal interpolation. The result paves the road of using NCEP operational data assimilation tool for the operational air quality modeling.

FRD

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Idaho Operations Office has initiated a modification to extend the existing interagency agreement with NOAA/OAR for an additional nine months. This was required after DOE was unable to complete a new agreement prior to the termination of the existing one at the end of December. One of the problems is that DOE issued a new policy that requires all agreements to be reviewed at a much higher level in the department. This new review policy may delay the approval of agreements by six months.

A manuscript based on data from the Wind Forecast Improvement Project 1 (WFIP1) is nearing completion with Jim Wilczak at ESRL as lead author and coauthors from ESRL, DOE laboratories, and FRD. It investigates the assimilation of observations from tall towers, wind turbine nacelle anemometers, sodars, and radar profilers into the Rapid Refresh model and how these additional observations affect wind power forecast skill out to 15 hours.