Real-time Environmental Applications and Display sYstem: READY

Air quality forecasters, emergency responders, aviation interests, government agencies, and the atmospheric research community are among those who require quick and easy access to tools that allow them to analyze and predict the transport and dispersion of pollutants in the atmosphere.  Because of this need, the web-based Real-time Environmental Applications and Display sYstem (READY) has been continuously  developed since 1997 to provide access to a suite of tools for displaying meteorological forecast and archived data and producing air parcel trajectory and dispersion model results through a series of user-interactive web pages.

READY provides a “quasi-operational” portal for users to run the HYSPLIT atmospheric transport and dispersion model and interpret its results. Typical user applications include atmospheric emergencies and exercises associated with the release of hazardous pollutants, forest fire smoke forecasting, poor air quality events,  ash transport from volcanic eruptions, and various climatological studies.  Web users can produce air parcel trajectories that move according to wind patterns defined by operational meteorological models run at  NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction. Meteorological data (forecast and archived) are available for running  HYSPLIT on global and regional scale grids. Users can also model the dispersal of pollutants with HYSPLIT by tracking thousands of Lagrangian particles across a domain, as opposed to one or two particles for trajectories. In this way, pollutant plumes can be produced from such sources as wildfires, chemical or radiological releases, or volcanic eruptions.  In addition, READY provides the user with quick access to meteorological data interpolated to the location of interest, helping in the interpretation of the HYSPLIT model results. READY can also be used as a diagnostic tool to provide air quality managers information on possible pollutant source regions that may have contributed to a bad air quality event.

This presentation will provide an overview of the current system and some of the unique applications that are available to the public.  In addition, some recent enhancements to the system will be shown including the ability to use some of the recently developed high-resolution meteorological data sets such as the High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR), the NAM CONUS nest, and the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) models.