Overview

NCAR's RAL has developed a new global climatography for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Joint Effects Model (JEM), a decision support system used by Federal, state, and local emergency managers for planning for and responding to accidental or intentional releases of hazardous airborne material into the atmosphere. The dataset consists of 21 years of hourly, global dynamically–downscaled reanalyses (40 km grid increment) from 1985 to 2005. The downscaling was performed with NCAR's Climate Four Dimensional Data Assimilation System (ClimoFDDA), which was originally based upon the Penn State/NCAR MM5 model, and is now based on NCAR's WRF Model. This unique dataset greatly enhances decision making for emergency management. It also has a variety of socioeconomic applications, such as for renewable energy. These energy applications include:

• Evaluating weather extremes–worst and best case scenarios
• Wind energy resource assessments
• Climatographic information at remote locations (distant from observation stations)
• "Regime–appropriate" uncertainty estimates that account for the variability of weather patterns
• The daily and seasonal variability of temperature, humidity, wind, solar radiation, cloud cover, and rainfall at any point on the globe.

This re–analysis dataset provides a new opportunity to address basic questions for an array of socioeconomic and ecological applications that were previously out of reach due to the coarse–scale representation (both spatial and temporal) of previous datasets.

Click to Enlarge
Comparison of infrared satellite imagery and the ClimoFDDA global 40-km analysis for 05 Jan 2001, when tropical cyclone Ando was active over the Indian Ocean. Surface precipitation accumulation (colors) for ClimoFDDA is plotted atop the 500 hPa humidity field (gray shades). Warmer colors indicate increased precipitation intensity.