Global Aerosol Analyses for AQ Decision-Making in the United States

The Aerosol and Radiation Section of the Naval Research Laboratory at Monterey is involved in a wide range of aerosol research and development activities designed to meet US Navy requirements for aerosol simulation and forecasting. These include use in predicting EO propagation, safety of navigation and constraints on operations. The U. S. Navy now conducts operational data assimilation and forecasting of aerosols and dust storms on global and regional scales. The Navy Aerosol Analysis and Prediction System (NAAPS) is run twice a day and produces analyses and 6-day forecasts of sulfate, smoke, dust and sea salt aerosols and visibility for the entire globe. The analysis for initialization is done with the NRL Atmospheric Variational Data Assimilation System for aerosol optical depth (NAVDAS-AOD). The Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS®) is run twice daily for Southwest Asia and produces regional 3-day forecasts of dust and visibility. In a post-processing step, the aerosol optical properties are calculated for each specie for each forecast output time at a number of wavelengths and used for regional EO propagation assessments, SST retrieval corrections, and the development of satellite algorithms. This talk will describe the data assimilation and forecast systems, optical calculations, applications, and validation.

The NAAPS and NAVDAS-AOD provide an efficient method to assimilate satellite data (MODIS, Deep Blue, MISR, and CALIPSO) to produce consistent analyses and forecasts that can have significant value to Air Quality (AQ) decision-makers by providing information on the impact of international aerosol particles on U.S. AQ. Presently, no quantitative daily forecasts or retrospective analyses of international plumes are available regularly to the AQ community as input to the decision-making processes associated with the Regional Haze Rule (RHR), Exceptional Event (EE) Rule, and daily forecasting. NAAPS provides a bridge between NASA and other R&D investments and thereby meets the information needs of air quality organizations. We will describe progress towards providing NAAPS analyses to the AQ community via the Visibility Information Exchange Web System (VIEWS) and the Federated Data System (DataFed). These are established and accepted Decision Support Systems (DSS) that currently serve data to a wide range of AQ users, including those involved with the RHR the Exceptional Event flagging.