HPAC 6.5 Model Validation: A Look into EPA Sensor Data Collected during the Lackawanna Steel Fire

DTRA Technical Reachback continually strives to advance atmospheric transport and dispersion capabilities through improving numerical weather prediction, complex terrain and urban environment characterization, and material source term definitions. In line with these efforts, model validation and performance evaluation are extremely important. This validation study was conducted in order to assess the performance of the latest version of HPAC 6.5 when compared to data collected from the 2016 Lackawanna Steel Fire. EPA sensor data collected during the fire is used as the basis to evaluate 12 HPAC run settings consisting of samplers to mimic the EPA sensors. Various weather models, terrain resolutions, urban data and wind solvers were tested. Presented here will be the results of the analysis.