A Review of NCAR/MMM's Forecasting Support for Recent Atmospheric Chemistry Field Campaigns

Since the early 1990s the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology (MMM) Laboratory has used real-time numerical weather prediction (NWP) models to support field campaigns. The development of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, which takes advantage of massively parallel computing architecture, has permitted researchers to produce high-resolution regional forecasts for many campaigns. Software infrastructure has been developed to enable placement of forecast domains anywhere on the globe. Such forecasts provide useful guidance to observationalists in order to maximize their campaign measurements while providing modelers valuable feedback on model performance in regions not typically studied. In this presentation some examples of MMM's forecast support for recent atmospheric chemistry field campaigns will be shown and services available to the community will be described. Emphasis will be placed on forecast support for NCAR's GV aircraft using output from NCEP's Global Forecast System and a locally-run WRF forecast. Examples of the benefits and challenges of these forecasts will be presented.