High-resolution weather analyses, forecasts and climatologies over coastal regions contribute to public safety, environmental control, and homeland-security. However, analyzing and forecasting weather in these regions can be challenging because 1) local circulations are complex, multi-scale processes that are forced by sea-land contrasts, urban landscapes, and orography; and 2) observations are normally too sparse, especially over water, to properly resolve either the macro- or micro-scale aspects of local circulations. NSAP has developed and deployed very high fidelity, operational, numerical weather analysis and forecasting systems to specifically address these challenges.
Day (left) and night (right) mean surface winds and temperature features over Kauai Island and surrounding waters, as forecasted using WRF for a date in July 2004 in support of a missile test.
The core technology of the modeling system is a multi-scale weather analysis and forecast system. The system employs a four-dimensional data-assimilation method, where observations are dynamically combined into a full-physics mesoscale model (WRF/MM5) to generate real-time analyses and short-term forecasts on multi-scale domains. The high-resolution computational grids are designed to resolve fine-scale terrain, land use, coastlines, and urban forcing. In the last eight years, the coastal-model-based research and operational applications have been conducted at several coastal sites in California and the Hawaiian islands for support of Navy missile launches, in New York City for transport and dispersion applications, at the Army Aberdeen Test Center for noise propagation prediction, for the 2004 Athens Olympics, for a Houston urban-impact study, for a United Arab Emirates weather modification study, for an Eastern Mediterranean weather prediction and precipitation climatology study, and for West African weather prediction.
