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Title: Wind-field development for the EPA Regional Oxidant Model

Technical Report ·
OSTI ID:5675211

Regional scale (approximately 1000 km) air quality simulation models require hourly inputs of u and v wind components for each vertical layer of the model and for each grid cell in the horizontal. The standard North American meteorological observation network is used to derive the wind field inputs for the Regional Oxidant Model (ROM) and other regional models. While a fairly dense surface network with hourly observations exists, upper air data are obtained only twice per day at monitoring sites typically separated by 300-500 km distances. Using these data to derive the more spatially and temporally resolved gridded wind fields needed by the ROM introduces uncertainties and errors into the model. The authors present a method of developing gridded wind fields for the ROM that accounts for these non-deterministic features. The method produces a family of potential gridded wind fields allowing for the stochastic nature of the interpolation process. Examples of the derived wind fields are given for the Northeast U.S. Potential differences between the wind fields, in terms of their effects on air quality modeling, are inferred from following multi-day flow trajectories using various members of the wind field family.

Research Organization:
Environmental Protection Agency, Research Triangle Park, NC (United States). Atmospheric Research and Exposure Assessment Lab.
OSTI ID:
5675211
Report Number(s):
PB-91-191213/XAB; EPA-600/D-91/084
Resource Relation:
Other Information: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Air and Waste Management Association (84th), Vancouver, BC., June 16-21, 1991. Prepared in cooperation with Computer Sciences Corp., Research Triangle Park, NC., and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Rockville, MD
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English