Air pollution dispersion forecasting: a climatological study of Cape Canaveral tropospheric wind patterns

The eastern coast of Florida, specifically Cape Canaveral, is host to a variety of climatological wind schemes that regularly take place at different vertical levels and time periods throughout the year. The goal of this research is to prepare a climatology of these winds for the purpose of air pollution dispersion forecasting.

A variety of wind patterns have been established for the east coast of Florida, including synoptic wind circulations accompanying extratropical cyclones which dominate upper level flow, land-sea breezes which develop during the night and day due to differential surface sensible heating of the land as compared to the ocean, and the nocturnal jet which occurs as a temperature inversion develops during the night and the flow above the inversion decouples from the surface. In this study, we explore the signals from each of these features in several datasets: North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) (32km, 3hrly resolution), an array of five 915Mhz Doppler radar wind profilers (100m vertical, .25hrly resolution), and a set of 40 surface stations in a 52x52km area. These datasets were used to explore what spatial resolutions in the observations are necessary to resolve different wind patterns, specifically to compare how well the NARR data resolves features depicted by the local instruments and vice-versa.