Overview
RAL is developing a regional climatology toolkit that will enable the French Ministry of Defense to generate high–resolution model–based climatologies for any location in the world. The Climatological Four Dimensional Data Assimilation (C-FDDA) technology is applied to the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) community model to downscale the coarse global weather analyses available from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis project or from the European 40 year Analysis project (ERA40). The objective is to generate 30 years of high resolution (∼3 km) WRF hourly output files over a 200 km x 200 km domain.
Secondary special–applications models will be applied to the WRF–generated historical weather data to derive some properties of the atmosphere that are not readily available from weather models. Those properties are visibility, turbulence intensity, and refractivity. The refractive properties of the atmosphere, which impact the propagation of visible and electromagnetic waves, will be estimated by application of an electromagnetic propagation model. And, the WRF model will be coupled to the community WaveWatch III model (for calculation of wave heights) within the C–FDDA framework.
A simple graphical interface allows selecting the geographical location and the time limits of the WRF climatology using simple point–and–clicking commands. The toolkit is designed to run on an off–the–shelf workstation. The system will be used at the French Department of Defense to support mission planning. The knowledge of the "expected weather", in a statistical sense, and some of its derived properties at a given location will help the Ministry of Defense plan exercises as well as future missions (e.g. peace–keeping in Lebanon). UCAR has obtained the needed document to export technical data and software to France.
