The Defense Threat Reduction Agency is developing enhancements to the Hazard Prediction and Assessment Capability (HPAC) to enable it to provide dispersion calculations in urban areas. The reason for this work is to support military and civilian operations when dispersion processes in urban areas are important.

DTRA often uses newly developed tools, following appropriate validation, to support special events. This support serves several purposes. First, planning to provide the support focuses development work on specific requirements and timelines, resulting in operational capabilities being achieved more quickly. Second, use of the new tool during the stress of a real event provides real-time evaluation, enabling problems to be identified and resolved. Third, products generated using the tool demonstrate the new capability to DTRA's customers, resulting in valuable feedback to the tool developers. Finally, the new tool generally represents DTRA's best available technology, which should provide the best possible support to the event.

This paper will describe DTRA support to a special event, using the newly developed Urban HPAC. The capabilities of Urban HPAC will be described, along with the ways DTRA employed the new system for operational use.