HR: 0830h
AN: A51E-0729    [PDF]
TI: A New Wind Profiler Trajectory Tool for Air Quality Studies
AU: * White, A B
EM: allen.b.white@noaa.gov
AF: CIRES, NOAA/ETL 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80305 United States
AU: Senff, C J
EM: christoph.senff@noaa.gov
AF: CIRES, NOAA/ETL 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80305 United States
AU: Keane, A N
EM: ann.keane@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA-ETL, NOAA/ETL 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80305 United States
AU: Koury, J
EM: jessica.koury@noaa.gov
AF: STC, NOAA/ETL 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80305
AB: The Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, the NOAA Environmental Technology Laboratory (NOAA/ETL), and the Science and Technology Corporation have developed a new online tool for producing forward and backward trajectories from hourly wind profiles measured by a network of boundary-layer wind profilers. The tool is intended to aid scientists and forecasters in the planning and execution of field operations during the 2004 Northeast North Atlantic Air Quality Study. This study will involve an international consortium of agencies and will include upwards of a dozen of research aircraft and the NOAA research vessel Ronald H. Brown. The purpose of this talk is to demonstrate the tool and collect feedback from scientific investigators, which we will use to modify the tool before the 2004 field study. In addition, we will present preliminary results from the 2002 New England Air Quality Study that demonstrate the value of using continuous profiler observations instead of numerical model initialization fields to calculate trajectories for the meteorologically complex coastal zone of New England. The trajectory tool uses the horizontal wind profiles measured by the profiler network that are collected in near-real time and archived at NOAA/ETL's facility in Boulder, Colorado. The vertical velocities are not used because of large uncertainty in the profiler's vertical velocity measurement. To calculate hourly trajectory positions, the horizontal winds are interpolated in space using an inverse distance squared weighting. Users may request altitude ranges for the trajectories as well as start and end times and trajectory starting/end points. Trajectories are plotted on a two dimensional map background and are color coded by their respective altitude range.
DE: 0300 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE
DE: 0345 Pollution--urban and regional (0305)
DE: 0368 Troposphere--constituent transport and chemistry
DE: 0394 Instruments and techniques
DE: 3307 Boundary layer processes
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting