(Invited Talk) Emergency Response Modeling for Coastal Cities – NCAR Activities

Operational multi-scale forecasting systems are being used for supporting the emergency response to the accidental or intentional release of chemical, biological or radiological (CBR) material in two coastal cites, Washington, D.C. and New York City (NYC). For NYC, the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) mesoscale-model products, with a fine-grid increment of 1.5 km, are used by two emergency-response systems: the Department of Energy's National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center's system and the Hazard Prediction and Assessment Capability operated by the Department of Defense's Defense Threat Reduction Agency. New York City Police and Fire Departments, the Office of Emergency Management, and other agencies utilize products from one or both of these systems. The Washington, D.C. modeling is part of the “Urban Shield” system that supports emergency management in the event of CBR releases in Arlington County and the D.C. area. Here, WRF, variational assimilation systems that employ Doppler radar and lidar data, and building-aware computational fluid dynamics models span the mesoscale, city scale, neighborhood scale, and building/street-canyon scales, and provide winds to transport and diffusion models. Final-analysis and forecast data generated by the mesoscale models are being archived, and university and other organizations are invited to collaborate on the use of the data for the study of coastal-urban climate and physical processes. Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Computational Fluid Dynamics Research Corporation contributed to the development of the above systems. Additional related NCAR research on coastal-urban weather includes development of improved urban-canopy models for WRF, an empirical study of the NYC sea-breeze climate, and the verification of two-months of operational MM5 analyses and forecasts of coastal-urban weather for Athens, Greece, performed in support of DTRA's counter-terrorism effort at the Winter Olympics.