DATEM – Data Archive of Tracer Experiments and Meteorology

Project Overview

The availability of meteorological reanalysis archives, at several international centers, provides an opportunity to link high quality modern meteorological data with the data from many older long-range tracer experiments. Below is access to experimental data, relevant reports, meteorological data, statistical analysis, and display software, all in a common format for PC or UNIX applications. This database permits the atmospheric transport modeling community to conduct various evaluation and sensitivity studies and compare model results with each other on a common basis. Users of the database are encouraged to share any additional analysis software that they develop and prepare and submit additional experimental data to the archive.

For more detailed information on the DATEM archive read the following paper available in Adobe PDF format.

Data Access

This pilot study incorporated data from five long-range dispersion experiments (described in more detail in the paper mentioned above), which represent a collection of more than 19,000 air concentration samples, reanalysis fields from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) / National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) re-analysis project, and statistical analysis programs based upon the ATMES-II evaluation of ETEX. All the emissions and sampling data are in space delimited text files, easily used by Fortran programs or imported into any spreadsheet. Meteorological data fields have been reformatted for use by HYSPLIT and are available for download through the links provided below. The statistical programs are all written in Fortran and include PC executables with the source code so that they can be compiled on other platforms.

Since launching of DATEM to the public in early 2000s, it has been expanded to cover a wide range of durations and distances, ranging from 10’s to 1000’s of km. More recently we added the Project Sagebrush Phase 1, which consisted of five tracer releases and aimed for the sub-kilometer scale transport with near neutral or unstable stability conditions, to the archive. In addition to the North American Regional Reanalysis dataset, a meteorological dataset for the CONUS domain generated with the WRF model is available from 1980 – the present year. The detailed information on the WRF dataset was published in Ngan and Stein (2017).

Downloading Data

Individual data files can be downloaded directly using these links.

Meteorological data can be downloaded in the HYSPLIT compatible (ARL) format:

Acknowledgment

Publications using DATEM data provided by NOAA ARL are requested to include an acknowledgement of the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory. An appropriate example would be:

The authors gratefully acknowledge the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) for the provision of the Data Archive of Tracer Experiments and Meteorology (DATEM – https://www.arl.noaa.gov/research/atmospheric-transport-and-dispersion/atd-programs-datem/) used in this publication.

User Contributions

Users of the database are encouraged to use the link below to share any additional analysis software they may develop or their own experimental data.

Evaluation Results

Statistical results from running HYSPLIT for each of the tracer experiments in the DATEM archive are made available in the following link.

Users can run HYSPLIT with various options to see how the statistics change for each DATEM experiment using the following link: