Ponente
Descripción
The National Weather Service (NWS) National Air Quality Forecast Capability (NAQFC) implemented a newer version of the operational air quality model, AQM version 6, at the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) in July 2021. NAQFC is a collaborative effort to improve operational air quality (AQ) forecast guidance among the Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), Air Resources Laboratory (ARL), and Physical Sciences Laboratory (PSL) within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) through the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) . The major upgrade includes extending our predictions from 48 to 72 hours and upgrading to the EPA Community Multiscale Air Quality model (CMAQ) version 5.3.1. CMAQ is driven by NOAA’s operational Global Forecast System (GFSv16). The Kalman Filter Analog (KFAN)-based bias-correction algorithm applied to both ozone and PM2.5 is also upgraded. The operational Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS)-Aerosol member at 25 km provides aerosol lateral boundary conditions to account for dust and smoke aerosols influxes. Various products are publicly available through the operational AQ display system (https://airquality.weather.gov/) and an experimental display in the cloud (https://digital.mdl.nws.noaa.gov/airquality/).
The performance of the AQMv6 is monitored daily and assessed through monthly statistics over the Contiguous United States (CONUS) domain and ten sub-domains. Overall, day 3 forecast skills over the CONUS domain during August are similar to day 2 for ozone in terms of the critical success index, while a slight reduction in skills is observed with PM2.5. Skill scores show large variability among sub-domains. In general, the bias-correction algorithm significantly reduces forecast errors for both ozone and PM2.5, including day 3 forecasts. More detailed evaluation results since its implementation will be presented at the workshop.
