Surface winds are generated with a one-level hydrostatic model that uses topography and upper-level data from NCEP Reanalysis as input. Mixing heights are determined from sounding observations using Holzworth’s parcel method and then spatially interpolated. Where they intersect terrain, a simple boundary-level approximation is imposed. Morning mixing heights are adjusted to account for local valley inversions when wind and cloud-cover observations indicate potential stagnation. The inversion location and depth is derived from terrain features using a unique GIS algorithm.
VCIS is being used by land managers to help plan for and mitigate the impacts of smoke from wildland biomass fires. Others use it to help determine impacts from a variety of pollution sources and to help identify cold pools of air that impact vegetation distribution. New efforts are underway to downscale the data, improve some of the approximated values, and make the raw data more readily available. We will describe some key features of the development and demonstrate the web-access tools.
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