Modelling the Atmospheric Effects of the 8 April 2024 Solar Eclipse in New York State

The solar eclipse during the afternoon of 8 April 2024 covered all of New York State with no less than 88.5% obscuration. This included at least 3.5 minutes of totality with a path ~175 km wide across the region. While the general atmospheric effects of the blockage of solar irradiance are well-known, each total eclipse has presented opportunities for both field campaigns and additional analysis of data from established observing systems. Studies that evaluate the ability of numerical weather prediction to model these effects have been more limited although Bessel’s method (A. Montornès et al. 2016) was implemented in the community Weather Research Forecast (WRF) model in version 4.3, which has been available since May 2021. One reason for this situation has been that such model configurations require high spatial and temporal resolution configurations over larger regions to potentially capture the meteorological response to the lunar shadowing from the eclipse, which can be computationally expensive.

To explore the predictability of the effects of the 8 April 2024 eclipse, we apply a customized version of WRF configured for 1km horizontal resolution for all of New York State and the surrounding area, operating in forecast/hindcast mode, which has been used for a number of retrospective analyses of severe weather case studies in the region. Observations from the New York State Mesonet are used for both data assimilation and to evaluate model skill for the eclipse period.

We will present an overview of the approach to the numerical weather prediction as well as an assessment of the model results. Since this is work in progress, we will outline the next step in this research and some of our current applications.