National Security Impacts

Atmospheric releases of hazardous materials, either accidental or intentional, pose a viable threat to both United States citizens, as well as to citizens and troops abroad. To counter this threat, RAL is actively researching and developing novel techniques and systems that can more accurately simulate the atmospheric state and evolution of the released material in both time and space. The capability to model and visualize source dispersion and the effects is critical for planning, real-time response, and forensic purposes.

Benefits and Impacts

FastEddy®: A GPU-Accelerated Microscale Model

Saving money, power and time with this LES modeling method. A viable tool for microscale operational, educational, and more comprehensive research applications.

**30-minute nowcasts of wind speed at a wind farm.**

FINECAST® Nowcasting System

FINECAST® serves a wide range of meteorological applications, such as severe-weather nowcasting, wind-power prediction, and hazardous-chemical detection, to name only a few. The true value of the model is that it can produce these analyses in mere minutes, delivering timely results to decision makers, forecasters, and utility managers.

New Delhi skyline shrouded by air pollution

Forecasting Unhealthy Air Quality for New Delhi

The system helps decision-makers mitigate the risk of air pollution in Delhi and surrounding regions. The technology may be adapted to provide air quality forecasts for other polluted areas in developing countries, as well as for cities in the United States.

Protecting the nation from deliberate acts of terrorism (such as anthrax) or from a toxic release caused by a natural disaster or an industrial or transportation accident.

Predicting Direction of Toxic Releases

This technology was successfully integrated into the US Department of Defense (DoD) emergency response modeling systems—HPAC (Hazard Prediction and Assessment Capability) and JEM (Joint Effects Model) in 2012.

Creating weather and climate products that convey uncertainty is difficult and it often requires running dozens of weather or climate models with small variations in the initial conditions to understand the predictability of the atmosphere. This process requires very large computing resources. Less expensive methods are highly desired.

Predicting Fine-Scale Weather and Climate Processes

The AnEn outperform a power prediction based on the European Center for Medium range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) ensemble wind predictions, a leading in operational forecasting at a fraction of the cost. AnEn provides forecasters, decision makers, and emergency managers with accurate information to save lives and property.

The RTFDDA system analyzes and predicts whether through integration of computer scripting code, a numerical weather prediction (NWP) core, and a method of assimilating observations into that core.

Providing High Resolution 0-12 Hour Forecasts

This data assimilation system was designed to take advantage of local weather observations and has been used to improve weather forecasts and historical climate analyses for the US Army Test Ranges, wind energy prediction systems, and geospatial intelligence applications.

Supporting the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC)

Knowledge of detailed predicted and actual weather conditions saves the Army millions of dollars annually. NCAR has since adapted the system and created derivative technologies for use by other organizations.

Contact

Please direct questions/comments about this page to:

Scott Swerdlin

Director, National Security Applications Program