The National Air Quality Forecast Capability (NAQFC) is a joint effort of NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS), NOAA's Office of Atmospheric Research (OAR), and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ) model was chosen as the chemistry/transport model and is driven by one of the NWS's National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) atmospheric models. This air quality modeling system produces gridded, hourly ozone and aerosol forecasts out to 48 hours. The NAQFC currently uses the North American Mesoscale (NAM) model.

To aid air quality model development and assess air quality forecasts, the Meteorological Development Laboratory (MDL) provided verification metrics for ozone and aerosol predictions for the CONUS and for six geographic regions in the CONUS. We used bilinear interpolation to calculate predicted daily maximum values at the location of the observation sites and compared these predicted values to the observed daily maximum, producing 2x2 contingency tables. To evaluate the NAQFC performance, we compared statistical measures computed for the summer of 2008 to those for the summer of 2007, for both ozone and aerosols.