Air quality and aerosol predictions at NOAA/National Weather Service
Abstract
Operational air quality predictions produced by NOAA/National Weather Service include predictions of ozone, fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and wildfire smoke for the United States and predictions of windblown dust for the contiguous 48 states. Prediction maps are distributed at https://airquality.weather.gov/ and as a web service at https://idpgis.ncep.noaa.gov/arcgis/rest/services/NWS_Forecasts_Guidance_Warnings. The prediction system for ozone and PM2.5 was most recently updated in December 2018, when a unified bias-correction procedure was introduced for these two pollutants.
In the spirit of integration of various operational prediction applications into the Unified Forecast System (https://ufscommunity.org/), NOAA is testing the Community Multiscale Air Quality modeling system (CMAQ) predictions driven by the operational version of the Global Forecast System (GFS) that includes the Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere (FV3) dynamical core since June 2019. This testing is allowing us to extend ozone and PM2.5 predictions to 72 hours (from 48 hours that operational predictions currently cover). As an additional unification effort, global aerosol predictions are being tested for inclusion in one member of the Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS) to replace the current standalone global aerosol prediction system. One of the largest uncertainties for prediction of air quality over the U.S. involves specification of wildfire smoke emissions. In order to test different approaches, several real-time experiments have been run for the summer of 2019 during the Fire Influence on Regional and Global Environments Experiment (FIREX). The experiments tested impacts of different fire detection products, different assumptions about the fire duration, fire strength, fuel type as well as influence of long range transport of aerosols into the U.S. domain from the global aerosol simulations. An overview of these recent operational updates and testing will be presented.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.A31E..02S
- Keywords:
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- 0345 Pollution: urban and regional;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0365 Troposphere: composition and chemistry;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0368 Troposphere: constituent transport and chemistry;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE